


The Habituation

by Derin



Series: Parting the Clouds [23]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-28
Updated: 2018-04-27
Packaged: 2019-04-28 20:54:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 21
Words: 26,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14457546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Derin/pseuds/Derin
Summary: The Animorphs have a problem. A summit is taking place in their hometown, where the leaders of some of the most powerful countries in the world are gathering, and the yeerks plan to infest all of them. Then, it's game over.The Animorphs don't know the details of the plan. They don't know how the yeerks plan to proceed, or even why they're doing this. But they have to be stopped. One problem: a new, inexperienced Animorph means a new team dynamic, and this is one big mission for David to cut his teeth on. Can the Animorphs handle both their internal and external issues, and protect the world from infestation?Thanks to Redtailedhawk90 and Liz for their excellent beta work.





	1. Chapter 1

“Okay, let me see if I have this straight.” David frowned at his notes. “So the yeerks crawl in through the ear and take over someone’s brain, where they can read their thoughts and memories and control their bodies.”

“Yes,” Jake said.

“But the person can still think?”

“Oh, yeah. You’re fully aware of what’s going on. You just can’t do anything about it.”

“You can’t even move your eyes,” I added. “And they see your thoughts as you do, so even planning anything secret is impossible.”

“You effectively become a weapon to use against your friends and family,” Jake concluded.

David looked pale. Too late, I realised that it had only been about a day since he’d lost his parents to the yeerks.

The whole team were in Ax’s meadow, notes scattered on a picnic rug and weighed down by rocks. Ax moved carefully around us as he inspected his meadow grass, crushing with an exploratory hoof here, shaving the tips off some blades and lifting them to visually inspect there. Over the last couple of months, his little scoop had evolved into a more stable-looking permanent structure, although the basic half-moon building shape hadn’t changed. The grass, which had once clumped fairly unevenly with a thin track worn in it down to the stream, was greener and more uniform, and he’d subtly trimmed some of the branches on the trees at the edge of the meadow to give the trees a more rounded look. I kept half-expecting to see a ring of red-capped mushrooms with bright butterflies fluttering around them or something.

It was too dangerous to meet in the barn, now that we had David with us. We needed to figure out just what to do with him, and he needed to be brought up to speed on the invasion. Quickly.

“But they can’t stay inside someone forever,” David said, looking back over his notes. “Every three days they have to feed in a giant pool of slugs.”

“Yep,” Marco said.

“And it’s underground? Under a good chunk of the city?”

“The tunnels stretch out to the edge of the forest over there,” I said, pointing in the vague direction of the area where I’d killed Aftran zero four seven.

<That one’s definitely closed up now,> Tobias said, <after what we did to it. But yeah, it’s a really big place.>

“Then why don’t we just blow that up?” David asked. “Invasion over.”

“That was the first thing we tried,” Rachel said. “Didn’t go well. We’ve attacked it, poisoned it, cut off its food supply… each time, they take a tiny hit and we nearly die. And each time, the security gets better.”

“Rachel, aren’t you normally Team: Storm the Pool?” Marco asked.

“No, I’m Team: Keep Them Running,” she corrected. “Pool or not.”

“Even if it wasn’t insanely dangerous, attacking the Pool puts too many innocents in danger,” I added. “Human, hork-bajir and yeerk.”

<Yeerks are not innocent,> Ax said. <They are evil.>

“The warmongers are,” I said, “but we don’t know how many people are caught in this system, seeing no way out.”

<Of course there is a way out. If they were averse to war and slavery, they would simply go home. The andalite cordon would not prevent yeerks from returning to their home planet, I am sure.>

“A lot of them were born in space,” I pointed out. “That planet isn’t – ”

“Can we discuss war ethics and the meaning of innocence later?” Jake asked.

“Can we not?” Marco asked. “Point is, attacking the Yeerk Pool is a really terrible idea, even though we keep doing it for some reason. We don’t even know if this is the only pool on Earth.”

David shrugged and looked at his notes again. “Okay, so the yeerks infest humans, hork-bajir – who are those giant lizards covered in knives – and taxxons, which are big hungry worms. And one andalite. Anything else?”

“Leera,” I said, “but not here, thank goodness. And some weird monkey things.”

<Gedd,> Ax said. <Also many other species, but not on Earth.>

“And what’ll they do to my parents?” David asked.

“I’m sure your parents are fi – ” I began.

“What does your mom do?” Marco asked.

“She’s a mechanic,” David said. “She looks after rides at that weird zoo amusement park.”

We all glanced at each other.

<Probably fine?> Tobias said. I watched David’s expression; it seemed like he wasn’t included in the message. <We hardly ever go to the Gardens these days, and Cassie’s mom seems to be fine, so while she’s definitely a Controller I don’t… I don’t think they’d be, you know, using her for anything.>

Marco nodded. “Your parents,” he said, “are almost definitely alive.”

We all winced.

“Way to sugar coat it, Marco,” Rachel grumbled.

“What? Alive is good. You want me to tell him happy little lies about how fun their lives are and about how there’s nothing to be worried about? If he’s one of us, he has to know what’s going on. Given the circumstances, alive is better than what a lot of people get. David: your mom will probably be left where she is unless she’s a genius mechanic or something, I think. I’m not an expert, though. As for your father, the yeerks will take every government secret he knows. Don’t worry, they won’t need to hurt him to do this. They’ll take everything and sift through it for anything even a little bit useful, of which there probably won’t be much because human military tech might as well be flint spears on the galactic stage, and they’ll probably keep him in his job in case more information shows up.”

<He might be put on security detail for Visser Three,> Ax said, <but it depends how many government agents they have. If they do not have many, he is more useful where he is, in case they want to try to capture any government figures.>

“Why haven’t they done that already?” Rachel asked.

<Perhaps they have. Our intelligence is limited. But I do not think it would benefit them early in the invasion, as then they will need to hide the regular gaps in their schedules for feeding. The same for military commanders. I… think that they will likely go for such figures when they are ready to expand, perhaps start a war with another major country or two.>

We all took a moment to digest that.

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” Jake said finally. “Any more questions, David?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Where’s the blue box?”

“Cassie’s hidden it,” Jake said. “None of the rest of us know where it is.”

“Not even you?”

“Not even me. The less of us know about it, the less of us can give it up if we’re captured. Ax says it can’t be safely destroyed with the equipment we have, so it needs to be hidden.”

“Destroyed? Why would you want to destroy it? We should be giving morphing powers to every free human we can find! Make an army! Take the yeerks down before they can respond!”

“Starting an open war with the yeerks will get a lot of people killed,” I said.

“So will sitting around doing nothing. I mean, even if we don’t take _every_ free human, we can still build an army here. Get some real firepower.”

“That’s what I said,” Rachel muttered.

But Jake shook his head. “We’ve been doing this a long time. We were lucky to have a good group. Expanding is good, but… messy. We have a list, really, and it’s been talked about, but… we want to be really, really careful about that sort of thing.”

“You gave it to me.”

“You were dying,” Jake said.

<Or about to be captured,> Tobias said.

“And you had been helping us kick butt, so we knew you were good under pressure,” Rachel added.

“Plenty of people out there are dying and being captured but – oh.” He smiled humourlessly. “I’m a test case, aren’t I?”

“It’s not like that,” I said. “It’s not like we planned any of this.”

“But it’s happened. So now?”

“Look,” Marco said, rubbing his temples, “You needed help. We needed help. The group thought you’d be a good fit and now you’re part of the group. We have yeerks to fight and loved ones to rescue. Can we play word games later?”

 _The group_ , I noted. Marco had voted against David, hadn’t he?

“For now,” I said, “we have a lot of things to get ready.”

“Okay,” he said, crossing his arms, “so what do we need to get done?”

<We have to get you somewhere to stay, first up,> Tobias said.

“And morphs,” I added. “You’ll need the basic set. Spying, flying, night flying, distance travel.”

“And combat?” he asked.

“Well, yes,” I said, “but I for one think it’s a good idea if we, you know, train you up a bit for that. It can be sort of full-on.”

“Pants-wettingly terrifying,” Marco clarified. “If animals wore pants. Nightmare-inducing. Potentially fatal.”

“I did fine yesterday.”

 _Nobody attacked you yesterday_ , I thought. _You did great witnessing this stuff for the first time, but being in combat is different_. Before I could say anything, though, Jake cut in.

“You did great,” he said, “but let’s do this one step at a time. First up: what have we got in terms of places to stay?”

“Staying with any of us is too dangerous, obviously,” Rachel said.

<He is welcome in my meadow, but I do not think I have the facilities to support a human,> Ax said. David glanced at Ax’s scoop, clearly struggling to maintain a neutral expression.

<I think our choices are really the hork-bajir or the shack,> Tobias said.

“The shack’s a dump,” Marco said. “Erek?”

“No way,” I said. “Way too dangerous. Erek lives in a pretty populated area.”

“Erek has… family.”

“Still too dangerous.”

<Cassie’s right,> Tobias said. <I think it’s going to have to be the hork-bajir.>

“The monsters who tried to cut everyone up last night?” David asked doubtfully.

<Not quite,> Tobias said. <Put on some wings, and I’ll introduce you to some of our friends.>

David hesitated.

“What’s the big deal?” Marco asked. “You’ve done this before.”

“Yeah, but I was kind of about to die at the time,” he said. “This is weird. You guys have to admit that, right? It’s super weird.”

We all looked at each other.

“It’s a little bit weird,” I admitted.

“Yeah, the shapeshifters-versus-body-snatchers thing gets insane sometimes,” Marco shrugged, “but look on the bright side. You never have to go to school again.”

Everyone except Ax glared at him.

“What? He doesn’t.”

Rachel strode over and took David’s hands. “It’s a bit creepy,” she said quietly, “but don’t worry. Soon you’ll get used to it. It’s really not that complicated. Your bones and muscles are almost the same as a bird’s bones and muscles, just arranged a bit differently. Your hair is a lot like the feathers that are going to replace it. Think of it like double-jointed people, having an extra bit of motion that seems weird. You can move your bones and muscles further than most people can.” She met his eyes and smiled at him comfortingly. Her speech didn’t sound hugely comforting to me, but it must have worked, because David was staring at her, looking kind of dumbstruck. He wasn’t the only one; I was staring in surprise that she’d actually remembered some of the ranting I’d done about animal biology and morphing, and Marco looked pretty surprised too, although probably for different reasons – it occurred to me that he’d only really gotten close to Rachel during the war, seen her rage and courage and protective instinct. He hadn’t known her very well before that. ‘Real life’ comforting Rachel was probably new to him.

David closed his eyes and started morphing, letting Tobias talk him through it. His clothes pooled around him as he shrank. Minutes later, two red-tailed hawks took to the sky.

 


	2. Chapter 2

We watched Tobias and David flap above the treeline and head for the mountains. Two identical red-tailed hawks, impossible to tell apart, except for the fact that one of them looked like it might fall out of the sky at any moment.

We were all silent until they were definitely out of earshot.

“Okay, fine!” Jake threw his hands up. “This is weird!”

“Super weird,” I agreed.

“I don’t like it,” Marco said.

“You never like anything,” Rachel pointed out.

“Not true. I like the Green Lantern. I like totally crushing Jake at Doom. I like girls who do that sideways braid thing with their hair and I don’t care who knows it. I don’t like staking all our lives on some random kid who could for all we know turn us all into Visser Three for his parents.”

“That’s not fair, Marco,” Jake said sharply. “I guess you’re worried I’m going to turn you in for Tom, huh?”

Marco didn’t snap back. He just rolled his eyes. “Of course not, Jake, because I know you. We all knew each other right from the start, except for Tobias, kinda. But David? We know nothing about him. He could get us all killed.”

<Or save us all,> Ax pointed out. <An unknown quantity is as likely a blessing as a curse.>

“Now even Ax is optimistic. Great.”

<I am always optimistic.>

“Yeah, you’re a little ray of sunshine.”

“We have to give him a chance, Marco,” I pointed out. “I know you’re all about the worst-case scenarios – ”

“Reasonable risk preparation.”

“Okay, fine, whatever, but if we never did anything because it might go wrong, we’d literally never do anything. We wouldn’t go on a single mission. If we never do anything new, we lose by default.”

“I’m not saying we sit on our hands and do nothing. I’m saying we tread carefully. This is risky stuff, and I don’t like the vibe I get from this kid.”

“Well, he’s here now,” Jake said with a shrug, “so we’re just going to have to move on from there.”

“What exactly has he done to upset you, Marco?” Rachel asked. “He’s been nothing but helpful. He’s being careful and skeptical and trying to protect his family. I’d have thought that’d be right up your alley.”

“It’s just his attitude, okay? He gives off a… vibe.”

“You don’t like somebody’s attitude? You?”

“It’s weird having a new Animorph,” I conceded, “but, look, you’d have to agree that expanding our numbers is a good move, right? And we have to start somewhere.”

<Not necessarily,> Ax said.

“Aw, come on, man!” Rachel moaned. “You were on our side!”

<I am not speaking from any... side, merely pointing out that it may not automatically be a good idea to expand our numbers. In war, bigger is not always better. We are a reasonably effective guerilla fighting force, but a guerilla force is very different to a larger military unit. Different tactics are involved, different priorities, different risks. We have no reason to believe that we would be useful as a bigger team.>

“We could still do small stuff with more Animorphs,” Rachel countered. “Some of us could actually get some rest occasionally, and when we needed more, we’d have more.”

<More Animorphs greatly increases the chances of the yeerks discovering your humanity,> Ax pointed out. He started counting his points off his fingers, which is stranger than you’d think to watch on an andalite thin, delicate, many-fingered hand. <It greatly increases the chances of humans discovering the invasion and pushing to outright war, something that we have established we will try to avoid. It adds unknown elements to the team, either as part of the bigger team or, if we do as Rachel suggests and switch people in and out of a small team, by making people relearn the team dynamic with every change.>

“So you don’t want to expand?” Rachel asked, puzzled. “You voted _for_ David.”

<I voted in accordance with my brother’s decision, because David had shown himself to be useful and cooperative and needed our help to survive a situation that we put him in,> Ax said. <I am merely pointing out that it would be an oversight to assume that dramatic expansion of our numbers is automatically beneficial. It may be. It may not be. We would need information and a strategy before we could make such a prediction.>

“If we expand,” Marco said, “I don’t think picking up random kids like this is the way to go. Trust me, this is a disaster waiting to happen.”

“How would you do it, then?” Rachel asked, sounding exasperated.

“With a known quantity. Our parents maybe. Or the Star Defenders.”

“No,” Rachel said immediately.

“Oh, right, letting them turn into animals and heal would totally put them in _more_ danger than they’re already putting themselves in.”

“You know, Marco, maybe we should go get _your_ friends and – ”

“Can we focus on David for now?” Jake asked. “Apart from generally not liking or trusting him, Marco, can you think of anything we need to be particularly worried about right now, with David?”

“Nothing comes to mind.”

“Then we just keep an eye on him.” Jake shrugged.

“Tobias didn’t want him either,” Marco said. “Did you notice that? He’s usually pretty, you know, open-minded about people.”

“You think?” I asked, frowning.

“Good,” Jake said, “because he’s probably going to do the bulk of whatever David-watching needs to happen, so maybe he should be suspicious. Cassie, how are you going with getting him morphs?”

“Cockroach and fly are easy,” I said. “I’ve got a couple in jars. I really think we should get him another bird; suddenly having two red-tailed hawks flying around now could… invite questions. So we can either sneak him into the barn, or I’ll nudge my dad to let me do the next release.”

“Safer is better,” Jake said.

“Release it is then. We’ll have to break into The Gardens after hours for a battle morph, so nobody recognises him. The big issue, of course, is actually teaching him how to morph. He’s got a lot of catching up to do.”

“In combat, too,” Rachel said, picking at the red polish on one of her fingernails. “Throwing him into combat as a rookie will get him killed.”

<This is why andalites have the _aristh_ rank, > As said sagely.

“The andalites can tell us all about it when they get here to save us,” Rachel said. “In the meantime, we have a new Animorph to train.”

“Fortunately nothing world-threatening seems to be going on right now,” I said. Jake, Rachel and Marco all flinched and looked expectantly over my shoulder.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Sorry,” Jake said, “I was waiting for Erek to appear at that exact moment and tell us about the next world-threatening thing.”

“Jesus, Cassie, don’t you know anything?” Marco hissed. “You don’t say things like that! Next you’ll be saying ‘it’s not like this can get any wor – ’”

Marco was silenced by Rachel, who clapped a hand over his mouth.

I cleared my throat. “Anyway,” I said, “we have some time to train him. Is my point.”

“Not really,” Rachel said. “This is prime keep-’em-on-the-run time. If they even suspect that we managed to sneak the morphing cube out – ”

<Then they will double the hunt for us,> Ax said. <We have suddenly become a far more valuable prize.>

“Okay, that too, but I meant that this could be a real morale hit for them if we keep pushing. We should be finding missions of our own right now.”

“We should be training David,” I countered.

“Why not both?” Jake asked.

We stared at him. It took him a few seconds to realise that we were waiting for an explanation.

“I mean,” he said, “there are little things that we keep saying we’re going to start doing and they always seem to fall by the wayside. Like freeing Controllers. Rachel, weren’t you saying before this whole David thing happened, how we should be putting people in that shack every few days and funnelling them to your father?”

Marco nodded excitedly. “Yeah, that’ll work. We target a nice easy grab and starve the yeerk out. Shouldn’t be too dangerous. We can get him into the rhythm of things that way.”

 _Starve the yeerk out_. I looked away. I knew this sort of thing was going to happen, of course. We’d talked about this strategy before; we’d used it on Jake, as well as a random Controller whose form we’d needed for the oatmeal thing. We’d tried to use it on David’s father, and sooner or later we were going to use it on his parents and on Tom. We were going to tie people up in that cottage and wait for our helpless captives to starve to death in those people’s minds.

I should have spoken out. A good person would have spoken out.

But I didn’t. Because I didn’t have any alternative, and it was war.

“Okay,” Jake said, clapping his hands together. He looked excited. More excited than I’d seen him in months. “We have Tobias pick us a nice, easy target, use them to train up our new Animorph and work out the kinks in this system, and then we can finally get that little ball rolling.”


	3. Chapter 3

I went home and spent some time with my family. Between getting lost in the forest, my time in Australia, and all the panic over getting the morphing cube, it felt like forever since I’d really spent any time with them. They were finally lightening up about me being out of their sight for more than an hour, which was a relief, but it seemed like a good idea to still be generally present.

I walked in to find my mum and dad squeezed into our little computer room, puzzling over some new piece of equipment. Mum was peering at the back of a box, frowning, while Dad fiddled with the cables of something white and electronic.

“Um?” I said.

“Hey, Cassie!” Dad looked up from the cables. “Check it out! Colour printer!”

It was indeed a printer. I nodded.

“The cable’s still not in properly,” Mum said, not looking up from the box. “A little window will open on the screen when it’s plugged in properly.”

“It’s definitely plugged in properly,” Dad assured her.

“Well it isn’t working. Either it’s not in or it’s broken.”

“Is it turned on at the power point?” I asked.

“Oh,” Dad said. “That’ll help.”

“Why do we have a printer now?” I asked.

“Because we have some Unibank money left over and I thought we could really get the name of the clinic out there,” Dad said. “We can make posters. At least once the laminator’s set up.” He pointed at another, as-yet-unopened box in the corner, presumably containing a laminator. “Hey, maybe your little environmental group can help us design the posters!”

I briefly considered a scenario in which Marco was allowed to design a business poster and suppressed a shudder. “Maybe you should get a professional for that?”

“But then what excuse would we have to buy shiny new business equipment for the house?” Mom asked.

“Why is everyone so happy today?” I asked suspiciously.

“It’s probably this new colour printer brightening the world.” While I was distracted wondering if I’d wandered into a commercial for printers, Dad stood up and strode over to lift me by the waist, spinning me once before setting me down again. “Ready for chilli?”

I felt the blood leave my face.

“We’re having Shepherd’s pie,” Mom said firmly.

“Killjoy.”

“No, that’s the job of your chilli.” Mum swept past us to the kitchen, smiling.

The shepherd’s pie was pretty good. I told Mum so.

“I’ll teach you how to make it,” she said. “It’s time you started learning to cook, anyway.”

“I can cook!” I protested.

“Being able to fry sausages doesn’t count,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Anyway, it might be fun to cook together for the party.”

“What party?”

Mum stared at me for a moment. Apparently discerning that I wasn’t kidding, she said patiently, “For your birthday.” After a moment of silence she added, “In three weeks.”

“Oh.”

“Did you forget about your own birthday?”

I flushed. “Maybe.”

Dad snickered.

“Well I suppose you’ve got some catching up to do, deciding who to invite,” Mum said chirpily. “Unless you’re too old for parties now, and have to go out and have a fancy dinner or something. I assume you’re bringing your environmental group, but who else? You must have some other school friends to bring. Should we just invite your entire grade?”

“I’m not ten years old, Mom,” I said awkwardly. “Nobody invites their entire grade to their party.”

“Well excuse me for being behind on birthday party etiquette. I suppose you don’t want the bouncy castle or the nursery rhyme tape for musical chairs either.”

“I know you’re joking, but bouncy castles are fun at any age,” I pointed out.

“Don’t tease beyond our means, dear,” Dad said, getting up to collect plates. He kissed Mom on the cheek. “Next year we’ll be sarcastically buying her sports cars.”

“You’re saying I can have a bouncy castle?”

“No.”

“Aww.”

When it came down to it, my invite list for a party really was just the Animorphs. But somehow, that didn’t bother me like it used to. I didn’t know David all that well yet, but the rest of us were six friends who had seen each others’ highs and lows, who had been there to support each other for every major problem over the past year and a half or so, who would die for each other and had proven that on many occasions – what more could one want out of a friendship circle? Oh, and it helped that we actually liked each other, too.

If I had any nightmares that night, they didn’t wake me up, and I didn’t remember them.

 


	4. Chapter 4

 

<I’m starting to get an idea of why this town is such a big missing person’s capital in the state,> David said the next night as we stalked our target. <Do you guys do stuff like this often?>

Said target was a middle-aged man who, according to Tobias, lived alone, made a very modest income in a routine office job, frequently called in sick and drank somewhat more than was healthy for him. He was completely helpless when faced with David’s puppy-dog eyes – literal puppy dog eyes, set in the face of a little beagle pup with tiny, quivering legs. David gave a tiny whine and hopeful little tail-wag before dashing off down the mostly empty street. Our target followed.

<I think we know who to send if we ever need to convince Erek to do something,> Jake remarked privately to me, before saying slightly more openly, <We’re not a missing person’s capital! Are we?>

<Not publically,> David replied. <I mean on all the lists and stuff this place is pretty absent, but Mom and Dad crunched the numbers before coming and the rate is pretty high.>

<That’s not what your dad was here doing spy stuff for, is it?> Tobias asked.

<I don’t think so. It’s not like he came home and told us about all the top secret stuff he did that day.> David ducked into the concealed alley we’d picked out for this mission and Jake, Tobias and I subtlely changed position to keep him in sight. We didn’t have to be all that stealthy – owls can move nearly silently, and humans never look up. The streetlights on the road were bright enough, but the alley was angled so almost no light shone down it; we could’ve dropped down off the roofs if we had wanted to, and stayed essentially invisible.

I saw our target hesitate, having lost track of the puppy; David gave a plaintive little whine and the man headed into the alley.

In the dark, we owls could see that the man couldn’t – Ax, holding almost still in the shadows. Andalite vision was even worse in the dark than human vision, and for a moment, it looked like he wasn’t going to be able to see well enough to get a clear shot as the man bent down and picked up David, who bit him. Swearing, the man stepped back, silhouetting himself a moment in a stray beam of light near the alley entrance, and Ax’s tailblade shot forward to crack against the side of his head. He dropped immediately.

<Great work,> Jake said. <Ax, get David out of here while we – >

<Uh, no?> David said. <I’m here, right? What if you need backup?>

<It’s a simple plan,> Jake said soothingly as Rachel and Marco, both in full clothing and shoes, dropped down from the opposite roof and lifted the unconscious man’s arms over their shoulders. <We won’t need backup.>

<Right, so that’s why three of you are on lookout,> he said.

<You don’t have a nighttime bird morph yet,> Jake tried.

<You know what blends in way better than a bunch of owls?> He wagged his little puppy tail.

<He has a point,> I pointed out. <I mean, we can’t do much from the sky anyway.>

<… Fine,> Jake said. <Ax, get wings. Rachel, Marco, keep David with you.>

Rachel flashed a thumbs-up to us on the rooftop. She and Marco carefully morphed a little of the other Animorphs into their faces, just enough to not be instantly recognisable if they ran into anyone they knew, and half-carried, half-dragged the man out of the alley, towards the nearest bus stop.

<We have to spread out a bit, guys,> Tobias said. <This many owls this close together just hanging out in the city is kind of weird.>

I flew forward to get a spot close enough to hear what was going on before Jake could say otherwise, forcing the boys to spread out.

“You know, Rachel,” Marco was musing, “if it wasn’t for this whole war thing, we could really spend more quality time together like this.”

“We could spend quality time pulling unconscious drunks out of alleys?”

“Not so much unconscious drunks, but we could definitely be doing something in alleys.”

“Puking? I’m trying to picture time with you in alleys, Marco, and puking is all that comes to mind.”

“Of course, forgive me. For a girl like you we’d have to at least be spending time at a bus stop, maybe even a movie theatre.”

“You mean a dark corner of a movie theatre, I assume.”

“Definitely.”

“Good choice, that’s a way classier place to puke. Don’t step on the puppy.”

<The puppy has a name,> David grumbled, struggling to keep up on his tiny legs.

Rachel, Marco, and their unconscious passenger slumped into the bench at a bus stop. David sat at their feet.

<How long is this guy supposed to stay unconscious, exactly?> David asked.

<It is difficult to be certain,> Ax admitted.

<So if he wakes up mid-trip…?>

<That’s what Marco and Rachel are for,> Jake said. <You remember the plan, right?>

<Sure, I remember the plan. I just don’t think he’s necessarily gonna cooperate with the plan.>

<That’s what you’re there for,> Tobias said. <Practice looking menacing.>

I went to glance at Tobias, then realised I didn’t know exactly where he was. Not that his owl face would’ve told me much more than his hawk face ever did. Tobias… hadn’t snapped at David, exactly; he’d probably just been joking, but he’d been pretty direct. Maybe I was reading too much into it. Maybe, knowing that Marco and Tobias had voted against him, I was looking for tension where it didn’t exist. That wasn’t going to help anyone.

David didn’t seem to pick up any tension, anyway. <And this guy will be okay, right? Mentally? I mean knocking people out is pretty risky.>

<Ax knows what he’s doing,> I assured him, hoping this was true. Ax had been pretty confident that he didn’t cause any permanent damage with that trick, but he, like the rest of us, was a kid who didn’t pay as much attention in school as he probably should have. Just because he’d looked at some pictures of human brains and decided he could knock people out safely didn’t mean he was right.

The bus pulled up, temporarily bringing a halt to the conversation while Rachel paid for tickets and Marco tried not to look like he was about to collapse under the full weight of the unconscious Controller. David jumped up and just made the leap onto the bus.

The bus driver looked down. “No dogs,” she said.

“You wouldn’t make Wuffles walk home alone in the dark, would you?” Rachel asked, batting her eyelashes.

<Wuffles?!> David exclaimed furiously.

“No dogs,” the driver said firmly.

“Look, ma’am,” Marco cut in, awkwardly folding the Controller into a seat several rows down the near-empty bus, “as you can see, my girlfriend’s uncle here has had a rough night.” He shook his head sadly, while Rachel’s expression turned glassy. “We have to get him home and put him to bed, and we don’t really have anywhere to leave little Wuffles, so...”

“Where are your parents?”

“Working late,” he said quickly. “Her Uncle Pete here was supposed to be chaperoning our date. You call this a decent chaperone? I don’t.”

“Sit down,” the bus driver said, turning her attention back to the road. “I didn’t see the dog, okay?”

They sat down.

<Okay,> Jake said, <Cassie, keep track. Tobias, Ax, with me; we’ll meet them at the other end.>

You might think that it would be difficult for an owl to keep pace with a vehicle over any length of time. You would be right. Fortunately though, a bus has a schedule, and needs to stop quite often, so I was able to keep the group in view most of the time.

I wasn’t sure what exactly I was supposed to do if trouble did break out. Dive-bomb the glass with my tiny owl body? Trust David the puppy to distract everyone long enough for me to morph wolf? The bus wasn’t exactly crowded, but every now and then somebody would get on or off, and there always seemed to be a few passengers aside from our group aboard. Any of them could be Controllers. Any of them could be armed, or have some way of calling for backup.

I supposed that half of my job was making sure that trouble didn’t break out in the first place. If I could do that, it wouldn’t matter.

Yeah. No problem.

We were halfway to the stop near our farm when the Controller stirred and muzzily opened his eyes. He blinked at Rachel, then Marco, each sitting on either side of him, wedging him in. They stared stonily straight ahead.

I put on my best ‘arrogant andalite’ voice. <Do exactly as you are told and you will get out of this alive, yeerk,> I lied.

He froze. I couldn’t tell if that was a result of my threat or the sharp blade that Rachel should be pressing into his side just firmly enough to make a point. Probably both.

<This is the situation,> I told him. <If you raise an alarm, you will die. If you wish to live, you will lead us to the Yeerk Pool entrance in the area we are taking you. You will allow us to acquire your host and stay present to allow us to bypass the biofilter. You will then leave. Do you understand?>

My view of the Controller wasn’t great, as matching speed with the bus was impossible, but it was obvious from his lack of immediate reaction that the wheels were turning in his head. He was weighing up his options, and his chances of survival. Immediate death on one hand, but on the other… if he could get us to the Yeerk Pool entrance and help us in, he could leave alive. And there wasn’t much we could do, surely; there was other security down there. Besides, even if we could do damage, if he didn’t help us in, somebody else would. Would Visser Three check to see whose DNA we had used and execute him later? The Visser didn’t have the longest attention span. He might live, he might die – that was certainly better than the certain death of making a ruckus on the bus.

Besides, cooperation bought time. Time to think of something. Time to be unexpectedly rescued. Time to find an opportunity to escape.

That was the train of thought we’d intended him to follow. I don’t know whether it was the one he’d actually followed, but the result was the same. He nodded, once.

I felt sick. The overall shape of the plan wasn’t mine, but this little speech was. Make someone face certain death, and chances were they wouldn’t just fold. They’d fight with everything they had, because they had nothing to lose. But give them a way out, a chance of survival, time to think of something, time for a miracle to take place in… so long as you could make them believe that that hope existed, you could control their actions. It was a lesson I’d learned well, from sheer experience. The yeerks kept making us make that very decision.

So I’d lied to him. I’d told him he might survive, so that we could lure him out into the forest and starve him to death.

<We are riding this vehicle to the end of its route,> I told him. <Make no trouble.>

Another nod. I felt sick. When we’d been making this plan and Jake had given me this job, I’d been too caught up in planning to pay much attention, but the truth was that I was the worst possible pick. Any Animorph would have been a better choice than me for this role. Marco or Rachel sat stony-faced in the bus, a silent threat. Either of them could have morphed just a little more than they already had, just enough to thought-speak, and made this speech. To them, one less yeerk was one less yeerk. Ax hated yeerks more than anyone, and he was actually an andalite, which was always a bonus. Tobias wasn’t a great liar but he knew the Controllers’ patterns better than anyone. Even Jake or David would’ve been better than me, although David’s skills were still pretty unknown; they had a vested interest in this working. They dreamed of taking their loved ones on a trip like this, on tying them up in that shack and starving the sickness out of them. And I… I wanted anything other than to be involved. I wanted somebody else to do this, so that I could distance myself and act like I wasn’t as responsible for this as everyone else.

I made a mental note: next time, give this job to someone else.

It seemed to take forever to reach the end of the line. Rachel and Marco marched the Controller off the bus, Marco adding a cheerful wave to the bus driver, with David following closely behind.

<Do not think of running,> I told the Controller, who was obviously thinking of running. <My allies are here. If you wish to leave, you will get us into the Pool.>

He stood up straighter, new confidence in his bearing. He was almost free of us. Just get us into the Pool. Then it would all be over.

I’d told a lot of lies as an Animorph. I’d never falsely promised mercy before.

The bus pulled away. Jake, a tiger, stepped into view. It’s actually a lot harder for a tiger to step into view than you’d think, especially in the dark. Despite being bright orange, they blend very well. The blood drained from our captive’s face; he was too busy staring at Jake to even notice Ax, tailblade at the ready, or Tobias, a horse, stepping up behind him. Tobias had to nudge him with his nose to get his attention. He yelped and nearly fell over.

<Cassie, Rachel, Marco, David; go home. We’re going to be guarding in shifts so get some rest. Marco, Ax, let’s get this done.>

We melted away into the night, leaving Jake’s group to their task. I went home. I tried to sleep. I couldn’t.

All I could think of was that shack where we’d tied Jake up long ago, and Temrash slamming my head into the table, and an old man screaming for help out there where no rescuer could hear him.


	5. Chapter 5

“But we’re sure he’s secure, right?” Marco asked for the millionth time, lolling on a bale of hay in the corner of the barn.

<I think Jara can guard one old dude,> David said from the rafters. I glanced up at him. Despite being physically identical to Tobias, it was easy to tell them apart. Tobias stood steady, trusting his senses and his hawk body. David moved from foot to foot, constantly glancing around, trying to track sounds too small for the rest of us to hear. He looked, if anything, like Tobias or Ax in human morph. <Jara has been a warrior all his life,> he continued, <and I don’t think he’ll be falling for any yeerk tricks. He was pretty emphatic on the matter of freedom or death.>

“A yeerk’s tricked Jara before,” he said, with a meaningful glance at me. I frowned, puzzled, and he mouthed ‘Aftran’.

“That was Ket, actually,” I corrected, “and I don’t think we’ve locked a shapeshifter in that shack, so...”

“Not this time, at least,” Jake said drily. Half the Animorphs glanced at him, concerned, but he merely wore a small, self-deprecating smile.

<Not this… were you guys Controllers?> David asked.

“Not all of us,” Marco said. He glanced worriedly at Jake again. “Let’s focus on this mission.”

<How many of you – >

“It _doesn’t matter_ , David,” Rachel said pointedly. “So. Flaws in this mission.”

“Speaker being outside the bus,” I said. “Unnecessary. If he’d spoken, I wouldn’t have heard him, and it wasn’t easy to see what was going on. One of you should’ve done it.”

“We couldn’t thoughtspeak,” Rachel said.

“Then morph further next time. You can thoughtspeak in a human morph and you were already morphing to disguise yourselves.”

“Humans with a knife was risky,” Marco said. “We should’ve had Ax in there. He has a rattlesnake morph. Way deadlier.”

“Actually, given strike time and venom – ”

“Fine, Cassie, maybe they’re not, but everyone who isn’t a vet thinks they are, so it would’ve worked better. Some Controllers would’ve made a fuss and fought us. Could’ve been messy.”

“Rattlesnake next time, carried in a sleeve,” Jake said. “Good idea to have Ax as the spokesperson anyway, being that he’s an andalite.”

<And our usual spokesperson,> Tobias added. <Visser Three knows who he is and what he sounds like, it’s not like he’s taking any further risk by talking. One of us talking raises questions.>

“It would be ideal – dee-yal-luh – if we could e-li-mi-nay-tuh the bus from the journey completely,” Ax interjected, thoughtfully sucking on the boiled sweet I’d given him before he could experiment with the flavour of anything in the barn. I was sort of impressed with the lack of shrieking, running around, and desperately reaching for anything else sweet-like to jam into his mouth. He’d been practicing human behaviour.

“Unfortunately, none of us can drive,” Rachel shrugged. “Can we, Marco?”

“I still think you’re overreacting,” Marco said loftily. “But I admit that stealth isn’t my best strength when it comes to driving.”

“Nothing is your best strength when it comes to driving,” Jake said.

“Mathematically,” Marco said, “something has to be – ”

<I can drive,> David said.

“You’re like ten years old!” Marco exclaimed.

<I’m your age! I’m in your classes!>

“ _Was_ in my classes,” Marco muttered.

“ _Enough_ , Marco,” Jake said sternly as David flared his wings and leaned forward on the rafter as if to swoop. “David can drive. If we can non-suspiciously acquire a car, that’s good to know. If we can’t, though...”

“The bus is less suspicious,” I concluded, when he trailed off.

<How many times can we use the bus before Controllers start noticing that their missing persons are all taken out here, though?> Tobias asked. <It’s not a hugely popular route. Somebody’s going to notice. They have cops, they’re probably used to missing persons investigations.>

“Not to mention the possibility of traitors,” Rachel added. “There are some sick freaks out there who want to be Controllers, and that’s not getting into the people being blackmailed, threatened or controlled with hostages. We can free them, but we can’t exactly stop people from walking right back into yeerk arms and letting them read our strategy out of their minds.”

<Hang on,> David said, cocking his head. <There are people who work with the yeerks on purpose?>

“It’s a whole thing,” Rachel said, waving the question away. “I’ll explain later. The important thing is, every time we use a strategy to free someone, there’s a risk of that strategy being found.”

“We must therefore be sure that our captives cannot tell where they are being taken,” Ax pointed out, “unless we wish to find a new place to keep them. The-the-themmmm. Although the structure that we are using… ing-guh... is primitive. I could build such a suitable structure elsewhere, if needed.”

“Okay then,” Jake said, standing up. “A lot to think about. Anything else we need to discuss?”

We all shook our heads.

<Whelp, I’m off to check on Jara,> David said. <It’s my guard shift next.> He flew out of the barn.

<I’ll keep him out of trouble,> Tobias said, following.

“Merlin for David, do you think?” I asked Jake, watching them leave.

“Hmm?”

  


“For a bird morph. Merlin.” I pointed to a small, agile little bird calmly preening in a large cage. “It’ll be ready for release in a few days, so we can take it out away from the house where there’s no chance my parents will spot him.”

“If you think it’s a good one, Cassie,” Jake said with a shrug. “You’re the animal expert.”

I opened my mouth to protest at being called an expert, but Rachel cut me off. “So Cassie, what are you doing for your birthday?”

Of course Rachel would remember. “I don’t know,” I shrugged. “I haven’t really thought about it.”

“Huge party,” Marco said firmly. “With a bouncy castle.”

“Mom already vetoed the castle.”

“What is a berrrrr-th-da-yuh?” Ax asked slowly, trying out the word.

“It’s the anniversary of the day Cassie was born,” Marco explained. “Humans like to celebrate them every year. Every one of our years,” he added after a moment. Then, after another, he added, “on the solar calendar.”

“What’s a solar calendar?” Rachel asked.

I tuned out while Ax explained this in the patient, overly formal tone of somebody who had spent far too long reading the world almanac. It wasn’t that I wasn’t excited to turn fifteen, but… birthdays just didn’t seem like a thing that were still allowed to happen to us. They were a normal childhood thing, a thing for the world before Elfangor’s ship had landed in front of us. Thinking about them here seemed… well, not silly, it’s not like it interfered with our world-saving work. But discordant, somehow. Part of the wrong era, like showing up at school one day and seeing everyone using inkwells and quills with no explanation.

“I’m surprised our Fearless Leader didn’t try to plan some kind of surprise party,” Marco was saying when I tuned back in.

“I thought about it,” Jake said with a shrug, “but I think we already have way too many surprises. Besides, can you imagine any of us trying to hide a big event from the others?”

“A birthday isn’t a big event,” I mumbled.

“Given the likelihood of us actually making it to another birthday when we started this nonsense? It is,” Marco said.

“Can you please explain again why the cake is set on fire?” Ax asked, puzzled.

Sensing the looming threat of a complicated sociological conversation between a bunch of people who had no idea what they were talking about, I headed outside, toward the horse paddock. I was joined a moment later by Jake.

“Should I have gone ahead with a surprise party?” he asked me.

I shook my head. “No, you were right; planning secret stuff around each other now is just a recipe for disaster.” I gazed over the paddock. Sometimes I still expected Midnight to trot over, looking for a treat… but Midnight was dead. The only trace of her left was the horse DNA floating in my blood, ready to be called forth.

I could feel Jake behind me. I could feel him raise a hand, as if he was about to touch me, then hesitate and put it back down again. I knew what he was afraid of. He thought I’d flinch away, remembering Temrash slamming my head into that table, leering at me through Jake’s features. He didn’t want to hurt me. But I flinched less and less these days. I remembered less and less. It was like the _talhu_ Ax has accidentally left in my brain; at first, the flashes of the message every time I saw a trigger had been incapacitating. I’d actually passed out the first time, in Jake’s lounge room, back before we rescued Ax. But by now they were merely nauseating, their power fading with every exposure. I wanted Temrash to fade. I didn’t want to remember him any more.

 _Touch me_ , I willed Jake silently. _Just put a hand on my shoulder. Do it. It’s not that hard._

He didn’t.

“Jake?” I said. “Can I ask you something?”

“Yeah?”

I turned to face him. I had to see his expression. “Why did you want me to talk to the yeerk?”

Nothing in his face but puzzlement at my question. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, you know I was the worst choice for that mission, right? You know I...” my fingernails were digging into my palms, and I almost wanted to leave my question… my accusation… unspoken. But it was too late now. If I didn’t ask, the suspicion would fester, and it would do more damage in my mind than it would hanging between us. So I plunged ahead. “You know I was the worst choice, right? So why did you make me do it? Was it because I...” I looked away, then forced myself to look back, because I had to see his expression or there was no point. “Was it some kind of loyalty test?”

Confusion flashed across his face. No wariness, no guilt. He genuinely didn’t know what I was asking. I relaxed.

“What do you mean, loyalty test? David’s here to rescue his parents; I don’t think any more loyalty testing is necessary.”

“I… I meant for me,” I admitted, my voice fading as I spoke. I was already ashamed of my suspicion. I could feel my cheeks burning. I stared at the ground and willed it to swallow me. “Because, I mean, after Aftran… I risked all of you for her, and I know you all still have to be mad about that, and I just know that since we’re talking about capturing enemies and starving them to death then everyone must be worried that I might… do something…”

I couldn’t continue, partly due to the sobs catching in my throat, and partly due to my face being pressed into Jake’s chest. He had wrapped his arms around me and held me firmly, securely.

Jake wasn’t actually all that strong, physically. He was fit enough from basketball, although he’d stopped playing that seriously when we became Animorphs, but he didn’t lead the sort of life that involved all that much heavy lifting or physical work that he couldn’t do in morph. I daresay I could’ve beaten him in an arm wrestle without too much difficulty. But somehow, his arms felt safe. Like they could stop anything from hurting me.

The sob melted in my throat. My sudden desire to cry was, equally suddenly, gone.

“Cassie,” Jake said, “I don’t think I understood most of what you just said. Nobody’s mad at you. Or if they are, they haven’t told me about it. I sent you to talk to the Controller because I knew you’d be the best at it.”

I pulled away enough to frown up at him. “That was an awful decision, Jake.”

He laughed quietly. “We needed to get him off that bus without a fight. I needed somebody who could see if a problem was coming and de-escalate it. David wasn’t supposed to be there, Ax is terrible at reading human body language, Tobias is better in the sky, and Rachel is the personification of escalation. Normally I would’ve sent Marco, but he’s been… weird… about David, and I don’t know what’s going on there. I didn’t… I didn’t realise it would be hard for you. I’m sorry. I’ll do it myself next time.”

“No,” I said quickly. “Send Ax. You’re right about the body language, but if our… captive… ends up with the yeerks again, it’s better that they only hear Ax.”

Jake nodded and let me go. “Yeah, that’s true.”

“But about Aftran...”

“What about Aftran?” Jake shrugged. “You’re not the only one who risked everything on her. Every one of us let her leave that forest alive. We all trusted your decision. Wouldn’t it be kind of hypocritical to throw it in your face now? Besides, it worked.”

I nodded. “But it might not have.”

“Then we would’ve been caught because every single one of us decided to take the risk. Not just you.”

“Can one of you please explain to Ax that just because sugar is flammable doesn’t mean a birthday cake will – oh, never mind.” Marco paused in the doorway, looking from Jake to me.

“Oh no,” I groaned, putting my head in my hands. “I just realised. We’re gonna be having Ax around a whole lot of party food, aren’t we?”

“We could… have a classy, foodless party?” Jake suggested.

“Food is the best part,” Marco said, shaking his head.

“We’ll all go to the movies.”

“We took Ax to the movies once,” I said, raising an eyebrow.

Inside the barn, Rachel’s exasperation had raised her voice enough that we could hear it. “No, look, some desserts with alcohol in them are set on fire before eating them, but that’s not how birthday candles work. The cake will be fine.”

“Ax, and cake, and fire,” Marco said, raising his eyebrows. “Nothing can possibly go wrong.”

“Hi,” Erek said, strolling down the path with a wave.

“No,” Marco said.

Erek stopped. “Uh, okay then?”

Marco pointed at him. “I said that nothing could possibly go wrong and you’re my ironic punishment. You’re here to tell us that something has gone wrong and the world is in grave danger and can only be saved by us doing something dangerous, aren’t you. Not today. We were on a roll.”

“What makes you think I’m not here to invite you all to my new book club?”

“Are you?”

“No. I’m here because something has gone wrong and the world is in danger and can only be saved by you doing something dangerous. Sorry.”

“Rachel!” Jake called. “Ax! Come out here, please?” In a lower voice, he said, “Okay, Erek, what’s the problem?”

Erek politely waited for everyone to be present before explaining. He didn’t ask where Tobias was.

“Several world leaders are gathering for an international summit to discuss some economic problems in the Middle East,” he explained. “The United States, Great Britain, Germany, France and Japan are coming. The summit is taking place on Tuesday.” He paused, looking at each of us in turn. “In town.”

“Um,” Jake said, “why? Don’t they already have places for stuff like this?”

“But the yeerks probably aren’t in those places,” Marco said.

“Exactly. I’m not sure how the yeerks managed to draw them here – it’s top secret, even in the Empire, so my information is limited. But they’re planning to infest every world leader who’s there.”

“Aren’t they all the world’s most powerful nations?” I asked.

“In a manner of speaking, yeah,” Jake said.

“From a human perspective,” Ax agreed.

“What do you mean?” Marco asked.

“Well, from a yeerk perspective, a high-population, low-individualist nation like China should theoretically be more valuable. If they are targeting nations… shunnnn-zuh… that are powerful in human culture. That has worr-y-ing-guh implications. Shuns.” He sucked his boiled sweet thoughtfully.

Jake rubbed his temples and sighed. “Cassie, go get the others back. Erek, tell me everything you know. Everyone else, go make your excuses to your parents. We’re gonna be here awhile.”


	6. Chapter 6

“So apparently the world leaders start arriving tomorrow,” Jake said once we were all safely back in the barn. “They’re staying at that big Marriott resort up the coast. That gives the yeerks a full day to get to them before the summit even begins, and then there’s the summit...”

“So let’s just go smash up the resort,” Rachel shrugged. “Everyone gets an elephant, we go wreck stuff. Can’t have a conference without somewhere to stay.”

<Wouldn’t work,> David said.

We all stared at him. I’d sort of forgotten he was there.

David preened a wing. <If we smash it up here, they have it somewhere else next week, somewhere we can’t reach. And the yeerks have spaceships, right? What’s to stop them from crashing the party wherever it is?>

Marco nodded. “He’s right. They’re probably just here because it’s convenient to be so close to the yeerk pool and they don’t think we know about it. We have to crush this thing once and for all, first time.” He grinned at Rachel. “Sorry Xena, I don’t think brawn is gonna win the day this time.”

“Oh, we’ll think of another way to make brawn win the day,” Jake said offhand. “We usually do.”

“This doesn’t make sense,” I muttered. “Didn’t we just talk about how it was a bad idea for them to go after world leaders? About how they’d have more trouble than it’s worth trying to feed their yeerks? So what’s the plan here?”

“Appa-pa-parently our reasoning was incorrect,” Ax said, shrugging. “It happens,” he added, in a very Marco-like way.

“But what’s making them lift their game now?” I pressed.

<The blue box,> David said suddenly. <They must know we can make as much help as we want now.>

<Don’t worry about that,> Tobias said. <The yeerks think we’re andalite warriors, and think that no andalite warrior would ever give technology to humans. It’s against their most important laws.>

David stared at Ax, who pretended not to notice.

“Erek said that there are some scattered rumours about us maybe having a superweapon,” Jake said with a shrug, “but that they were so ridiculous that even the yeerks spreading the rumours can’t possibly believe them. He asked me if we have anything called a _sh’krenik_.”

“Need a cough drop?” Marco asked.

“It’s hard to pronounce, okay? Apparently it’s a metal ball, about so big...” he mimed with his hands… “that some yeerks said we had and now some of the admin are freaking out about it while everyone else is telling them to stop being stupid. Cassie, are you alright?”

I supposed I probably looked as bad as I felt. So much blood had left my face that I was dizzy. My hands and feet tingled.

“Uh-huh,” I lied, trying not to do the high-pitched fakey thing with my voice that I always do when I lie without practicing first. “I’m fine. Go on.”

Nobody was fooled.

“Cassie,” Rachel said with mock stern, “do you have an alien superweapon that you haven’t told the class about?”

“No, I don’t have anything like that,” I said, waving the question away. “I was just thinking about how this world leader thing will be David’s first real mission, and it’s gonna be one of our most important ones yet.”

<Blowing up that alien continent was pretty important,> Tobias said.

“Also destroying that undersea base when we had those awful mind control chips,” Rachel added, inspecting a nail. “Warrior sharks could’ve been a pretty big deal on some planets.”

<Leera was already bad enough,> Tobias agreed.

“We’d all be dead if we didn’t establish that time-portal at the right moment when I got killed in the Amazon,” Jake said. “Sometimes the little things matter.”

<Is it too late to back out of this team?> David asked.

<How do we handle this summit problem?> Ax asked when it was clear that Jake wasn’t going to pull us back on track. <I am not seeing how we can permanently defeat this strategy without assistance from the world leaders themselves. Do we need to revise our plan to keep the war secret?>

That brought everyone’s focus back.

“If we do that,” Marco said, “we pull humanity into an open war it can’t win. It’d be better to just lose the world leaders.”

“Coward,” Rachel muttered. “We should at least give humanity a chance to fight.”

“Give humanity a chance to die, you mean?”

“You always say it’s hopeless for us Animorphs, that we’re going to die, but we’re still fighting,” she shot back.

“And yet whenever Melissa – ”

“We don’t need to make the war public,” I cut in quickly, before a full-blown argument could start up. “Ax, you’re suggesting that we tell the world leaders, right?”

<Yes.>

“Then I’m sure we can get them to understand the seriousness of keeping it quiet.”

“How sure, Cassie?” Marco asked. “I don’t pay much attention in history class but one thing I’ve learned there is that most of the world’s problems are because one scared or greedy or bored hothead screwed everything up for everyone else. If we go in there and tell the leaders of five of the world’s most powerful nations that we’re under alien attack, all it takes is for one of them to bravely start a glorious war and they drag the whole world down with them. If we do this, we’re staking the future of humanity on those people. I don’t want to be sitting in this barn three months from now talking about how we have to kidnap the President to stop the yeerks from assassinating him while we work with Visser Three to discredit his words as the ravings of a madman. And that’s assuming we get a warning and don’t just wake up to the sound of the city being Draconed around us.”

“Do you have a better plan, then?” Rachel asked.

Marco was silent.

<We should scout out this resort,> Tobias suggested. <We still have a night before the leaders start arriving. We need to know the territory we’re working with.>

“But very carefully,” Jake said. “The yeerks can’t know that we know, or it’s all over. Tobias, take Ax and… who’s most confident of being able to sneak out?”

“I can go,” David said.

“You have a shift guarding our new friend,” I said quickly, before anyone could mention that this was too dangerous for a newbie. “I’ll go.”

Jake nodded. “Okay. The rest of us better skedaddle, then. Cassie can report tomorrow at school.”

“Did you just use the word ‘skedaddle’?” Rachel asked, frowning.

I shooed them out of the barn before they could take up another half hour of pointless semantic bantering. It was going to be a long enough night already.


	7. Chapter 7

As we headed out to the Marriott, the still-warm air off the pavement lifting our owl wings up into the darkening sky, I began to regret volunteering for this mission.

Mostly because sneaking around my parents had gotten pretty hard after the Aftran thing and that, although they were calming down now, slipping out in the night was still pretty dangerous. But also because working with Ax and Tobias can be kind of frustrating. They were nice people, with none of the tension of working with Jake or the annoyance of working with Marco or that nervous feeling I always got working with Rachel that something very ridiculous and very dangerous that was impossible to justify to the rest of the group was about to happen – they were calm, withdrawn, mostly sensible people, which was part of the problem. More specifically, we were all, well, followers. Whenever we tried to do something together, nobody could figure out who was supposed to be making the decisions.

Ax was, of course, trained to take orders. He hesitated to use initiative at the best of times, and if Ax was running off and doing something without confirming with someone else first, you knew he’d been pushed to the edge. Tobias had always been something of a loner, and while we didn’t talk much about his past, I got the impression that with the way he’d been raised, the idea of somebody else listening to and obeying anything he had to say felt kind of ridiculous to him. If something needed doing, he was more likely to go off and do it by himself without telling anyone. And I, well, I was never comfortable making decisions for the group. If it was something I couldn’t do myself, I normally passed it onto the group at large, or at least to Jake, and let them deal with the decision. I might make my argument to the group, or I might work alone if I had to, but telling a team what to do wasn’t really one of my skills.

We weren’t the most cohesive team, is what I’m saying here.

We found the resort easily enough. Tobias is really good at navigating the area; he spends a lot of his time following Controllers all over the place to map their movements. The three of us landed on the surrounding fence that somebody had tried to design to look ‘artsy’ and hide its obvious intention of ‘keep out everyone who’s not rich enough to be here’.

<Here it is,> Tobias said. There it was. We all looked at the buildings spread before us.

<Nice-looking place,> I said vaguely. We looked at it some more.

<I’m going to see if I can find out where the meeting is going to take place,> Tobias said, taking to the sky.

<Good idea,> I said.

The resort was pretty big. The rooms seemed to go on forever, broken up by various entertainment areas. Fortunately, finding a map was easy; I quickly located the biggest, fanciest conference room and headed over. Tobias and Ax were already there when I arrived, perched in a tree where they could see into a big window without being seen.

Preparations for the ceremony were already underway. The conference room was huge, and rows of seats were already in place, facing a podium. Some very large, very fancy pillars lined the room, and a tall, dark-haired man was arguing intently with a couple of scared-looking people holding clipboards while gesturing to one of these pillars.

<I’m going to see if I can get a clear view of their lips,> Tobias said.

<It’s too risky,> I objected. <We can’t afford to be seen.>

<Don’t worry, Cassie, I know what I’m doing.> Tobias launched himself silently from the tree, but he’d barely flown a few feet before banking and flapping his way back up again. <Do you guys feel that?> he asked.

<Feel what?> Ax asked.

<It’s Visser Three! His… fear aura thing is weaker than usual, but...>

<He’s probably trying not to do it,> I mused. <He’s arguing. It’s habit. Which one is he?>

<Judging by how scared the others look, I’m going with Dark-haired Pillar Guy,> Tobias said. <Why is he in human morph, though? Are those other two not Controllers?>

<It is… possible that outsiders may be involved in this plan,> Ax said doubtfully. <It may not have been worth infesting the entire resort staff.>

<For a plan this big?> Tobias asked. <Bit of a risk, isn’t it?>

<Perhaps they are rushed. Is there something about resort workers that would make them complicated to maintain as hosts?>

<Are they resort workers?> I asked. <They’re probably government people, right? This is a government thing. Wow, we are not prepared for this.>

<Hang on,> Tobias said. <He’s just turned so I can see… yeah, he’s saying that the world leaders should move behind that pillar there on their way up to the podium.>

<Why?> I asked.

<I don’t know. That’s just what he’s saying. The clipboard girl is saying that’s an unnecessarily complicated… damn, she just turned away. He says they just have to move the – ugh!> Tobias broke off and flinched back. Ax and I flinched, too; the wave of malevolence that I’d learned to associate with Visser Three washed through us briefly, then subsided. The people he was talking to visibly stepped back, looking pale.

<We should get out of here,> I said. <When Controllers get flinchy is usually about when they start noticing weird animals.>

<Agreed,> Tobias said. He stared intently at the room for a few more seconds, then took to the sky. Ax and I waited long enough that our exits wouldn’t look weird to anybody who might happen to see us, then followed. I went straight home. We’d have to report to the rest of the Animorphs soon enough, but it could wait until the next day; pulling Jake, Marco and Rachel from their houses in the middle of the night would be nearly impossible.

Besides, I had a lot of thinking to do before then. About the summit, about how many of our old assumptions this overturned, about David. And about this supposed superweapon that the yeerks might have thought we had.

I was pretty sure I knew what it was.


	8. Chapter 8

I snuck back into my room and went straight to my little pinboard. I’d acquired more notes and cards than my supply of pushpins could handle and kept forgetting to buy more, so there was a lot of doubling up. As I pulled down the card I wanted, another piece of paper floated free – one of my little quotes. “If you are not more confused by what is false than what is true, you have zero knowledge.” I pinned it back up and inspected the card I wanted.

It was a postcard. On the front was a clear image of a red sun rising over a rolling desert. A kangaroo stood on one side of the picture, staring out. I flipped it over to read the carefully innocent update on Yami’s life, with no mention of alien invasions or my visit anything else that would look suspicious if the wrong person happened to read the card. It did say that his family was doing well, and that his grandfather had recovered nicely from his infection and was adapting well to having only one leg. It made no explicit reference to my part in that situation, of course.

Maruntu had sacrificed himself to buy time for me to get his family out of danger, and I’d gone back with the help of a chee to save him. It had seemed pretty straightforward at the time. I had put myself in danger, sure, and one might argue that I had a responsibility to stay alive for the benefit of the Earth, but Maruntu’s situation had been my responsibility and I wasn’t getting caught in any kind of ‘for the greater good’ immoral action chain reaction. I hadn’t expected anything big to come of it. But I should have.

When we’d bluffed having a superweapon to make the yeerks back off, I should have expected Visser Three to remember. I should have expected the other yeerk witnesses to pass along the word of the metal sphere held in my chee ally’s hands while I threatened to detonate it. I wasn’t sure what the sphere was supposed to do, but we’d pretended to have one, and it had terrified the Visser. Was that why he was accelerating his plans? Was his belief in the presence of that weapon the reason the yeerks were pushing to infest world leaders? Had my actions pushed this war, which we’d fought so hard to keep small and slow until the andalites could arrive, to a point we wouldn’t be able to recover from? How many people were going to die from that little bluff?

Rob clearly hadn’t shared much of our little adventure with the other chee, or else Erek would know exactly why the yeerks thought we had some kind of metal sphere superweapon. I was going to have to tell them, and the Animorphs. This might be something we’d have to start planning around. What exactly was I supposed to say? How was I supposed to tell my teammates that a random bluff might have backfired and doomed us all?

I pinned the card back up, careful not to let the quote fall again. There was too much going on for me to worry about petty things like personal reputation. For now, though, we couldn’t be distracted; the Fake Superweapon Problem would have to wait until after the World Leader Infestation Problem. And that would have to wait until after sleep. If we were going to report on our scouting mission before school, it was going to be an early morning for me.

I stole a sedative from the barn and cut the dose down to my weight and desired effect time. This was part math, but mostly based on sheer experience. It wasn’t always easy to get the sleep I needed to save the world; I’d been turning to chemical help more than I probably should lately. The consequences of sedative addiction were something I could worry about when I no longer needed to fight aliens. If I focused on that, I could almost believe that it might be a real possibility – a future where I didn’t have to fight aliens and could focus on the more mundane consequences of my actions.

Almost.


	9. Chapter 9

<The pillars are a bit thicker than that,> Tobias directed from the branches of a lone, scraggly tree. <Six to a side. About a foot further in.>

David nodded and moved further in, redrawing a big circle in the sand with a stick. We were out in the Dry Lands, about two hours before school. Ax’s clearing didn’t offer the kind of wide, sandy spaces necessary for drawing really big diagrams.

<Visser Three was here,> Ax said, moving into position. <Arguing about this pillar.> He gestured the pillar nearest the podium with one stalk eye.

<He was insisting that the world leaders walk around behind it when making their way to the stage,> Tobias said.

“Why?” Rachel asked.

“That’s the million dollar question,” Jake said. “This big rectangle is the seating area?”

“Yeah,” David said.

“Okay. Cassie, David, Marco, go be sides of the pillar. Rachel, walk up from the front row to the podium, behind the pillar. Ax, be ready to keep time.”

We stood where we were told. Jake stood on the back edge of the seating area and made a little frame with his hands to look through. “Rachel. Go.”

Rachel swaggered around behind the pillar and toward the podium at a perfect stately pace. Once I was between her and Jake, he said, “Start timing,” and dashed to the front of the audience. Rachel rounded the pillar. “Ax, stop. How long?”

<Six point three three of your seconds, Prince Jake.>

“There we go. These are some of the most heavily guarded people in the world. Visser Three’s plan buys six seconds where each of them is out of sight from the audience.”

“What can you do in six seconds, though?” I asked.

“Can they infest them that fast?” David asked. “Have someone grab them, shove a yeerk in their ear, they keep walking?”

“I doubt it,” Jake said. He glanced at Ax, who flicked his stalk eyes in the andalite equivalent of a shrug. “How long was I in that jaccuzzi that one time?”

“That was like fifteen, twenty seconds,” I said. “Who knows how much of that time the infestation actually took. Also you were kind of out of it for awhile afterwards, but that might’ve been concussion.”

“Aftran took Cassie pretty fast,” Marco said, “and was up on her feet right away.”

“I wasn’t fighting, though,” I pointed out. “Somehow I don’t think any world leader is going to take kindly to being grabbed. And how would they keep them quiet? They can’t stun them if they’re supposed to keep walking.”

“What if they’re not?” David asked. “How many Controllers can shapeshift?”

“Just Visser Three,” Rachel said.

“So they could only get one, then. But what if they stun him, then the Visser acquires and morphs him behind the pillar?” He circled the pillar mark thoughtfully. “You might be able to fit an andalite back there, if you were careful.”

<Nobody could morph in six seconds,> Ax protested. <It is impossible.>

“Ax, time Cassie,” Jake said. “Cassie, announce when you start.”

“Focus in three… two… one...” I focused on Rachel.

I’d barely started when Ax said, <Six seconds.>

I opened my eyes. I was a bit taller, and my skin was slightly lighter, but that was about it.

<Yeah,> Tobias said, <there’s no way.>

“He’s an andalite, though,” David pointed out. “He’s probably better at it.”

Ax’s stalk eyes whipped around to face him. <Visser Three is _not_ an –  >

“Okay, okay,” Jake said, raising a hand. “Cassie’s a better morpher than Visser Three, trust us on this. And it’d be his first time with the morph, which can be tricky. And he needs to acquire the world leader, too. No way would he try something that risky.”

“Have you seen yeerk plans?” Rachel asked. “They’re almost as bad as ours.”

“Yeah, but they don’t usually endanger Visser Three personally,” Marco pointed out. He stepped back from the pillar mark and eyed it, pinching his nose. “What if it’s a switch?”

“What do you mean?” Jake asked.

“I mean, what if Visser Three has already acquired a world leader? He waits, in morph, for him to move around, stuns him, takes his place.”

“If he’s already acquired him, why not just replace him then?” Rachel asked.

“Getting rid of the body,” David said suddenly. “I mean, the world leader. If he acquires him, he’s gonna have the actual world leader still hanging around. These guys don’t even take elevator rides by themselves. How’s he gonna sneak the body out? He’s probably got a system set up in that room; a trapdoor or a hollow pillar or something. So let’s say – he morphed something really small to get in to see some world leader in his private rooms or whatever, acquired him in his sleep, and left. Now when they poor guy walks behind the pillar, he’s waiting in morph to stun him and move up to the podium, do his speech or whatever, and that gives his guys, what… somewhere between twenty minutes and an hour, depending how long these speeches are gonna be?… to get the guy infested and wake him up. Then they switch again on his way back.”

“Jesus,” Marco muttered. “If that’s the plan, he can get all of them that way. Provided he managed to acquire them all beforehand, and there’s a long enough gap between speeches to let him demorph and remorph...” Marco suddenly grinned. “You guys realise that if we’re right about this, Visser Three has to memorise and deliver five long boring political speeches that are probably gonna disagree with each other, right? Man, I’d pay money to see him try to pull that off.”

“You’ll probably get your chance,” Rachel said darkly. “I don’t see how we can possibly stop this before it happens. We’re gonna have to crash this conference, aren’t we?”

“Probably,” Jake said wearily. “Anyone got any ideas on how to do that without revealing the alien invasion to the world?”

We did not.

“Ten bucks says we don’t get through this without committing treason,” David said. “Any takers?”

<I’ll take that bet,> Tobias said. <We’ve been at this game long enough that I reckon we can manage without treason.>

“Where did you get ten bucks?” Marco asked.

<Marco, I spend most of my time tracking Controller movement around the city. Do you have any idea how much money people just drop on the street?>

“Saving up to treat yourself to McDonald’s new Ratburger collection?” Marco asked.

<Pfft, McDonald’s? I’m gonna buy some land and start my own Ratburger restaurant. You can work the counter if you want. With that face you won’t even need the rat mask part of the uniform, we’ll just get you some Mickey Mouse ears.>

“Are we done here?” I asked. “I want to go get ready for school and not have to hear the rest of this conversation.”

“We’re done here,” Jake confirmed.

I helped scuff out our big map, morphed, and got out of there.


	10. Chapter 10

I had thought that my few hours of sleep would be enough to tide me through school. They were not.

Rachel poked me awake for the third time in science class. “Next time Jake can do his own scouting mission,” she muttered in my ear. “You need to sleep more.”

“I’m fine.”

“Really? What does the pancreas do?”

I blinked at the diagram of a pancreas in front of me. There was a description, but the words blurred when I tried to focus on them. “That proves nothing. I’m barely passing science even on my good days.”

“I thought you loved science.”

“Just because I understand the scientific method doesn’t mean I’m any good at memorising all the bits of the cardiovascular system.”

“This is a picture of the endocrine system.”

“That also proves nothing.”

“Cassie, Rachel,” Miss Harlowe called from the front of the room. “Anything you want to share with the class?”

“No, sorry, Miss Harlowe,” we chimed. She gave us a meaningful look, then went back to talking.

“Go home,” Rachel hissed to me.

“No.”

“Why not? You’re learning nothing here. Say you’re sick. Trust me, they’ll believe you.”

She was right. I told the teachers I was sick. Dad came to pick me up at lunch.

Dad tried to make small talk on the way home, but I wasn’t very good at responding. The problem with having vet parents, of course, is that it’s kind of difficult to fake being sick, but dad didn’t push my story. He checked my eyes, throat and temperature when we got home and sent me off to bed with plenty of water. Maybe I actually was sick? Probably not. I hadn’t gotten an infection since becoming an Animorph, which sort of made sense if you thought about it, so long as you didn’t think about it too hard and realise that morphs couldn’t be spawned sterile or we would all be dead from a lack of natural bacterial populations. Probably not something that was going to make any more sense if I thought about it when tired, anyway. I went to bed.

I woke up face-down on the beach, my throat raw and my mouth tasting of salt, coughing. As soon as I was conscious enough, I pulled my weak, trembling body up onto my hands and knees and threw up. Then I tried to stand. This was more difficult than you’d think; my legs simply didn’t want to hold my weight. I pulled myself up, tottered forward a few steps, then sank to my knees. The sand wasn’t soft enough to stop pain from stabbing through my bruised knees as they hit the ground.

I was heavily bruised, my skin scraped raw in several places. None of my cuts looked dangerously deep, but whatever had happened to me had made a complete mess of my morphing outfit the yellow spandex torn to shreds in several places. There was blood in my mouth – two of my teeth were missing. None of that was a problem; I could heal. What worried me was the air. The air felt very, very wrong.

It’s difficult to explain how the air felt wrong. It might have been an unfamiliar smell. Whatever it was wasn’t killing me; to the contrary, I felt stronger with every breath. The sunlight was wrong, too; soft and red in a way that I never experienced at home. My muscles felt stronger; I stumbled to my feet, looked around, and froze.

Yes, something was very, _very_ wrong.

The ocean to my right looked like an ocean. No surprises there. But to my left, plants stretched out, grasses and shrubs struggling to make a life in the shifting sands. And not a single one of those plants was familiar to me.

I told myself not to panic. My first assumption was that I was, somehow, on another planet, but there was no reason to assume that everywhere on Earth had plants that would be familiar to me. Besides, when I looked at the plants more closely, there was something very Earthlike about them. I’d seen andalite plants and Leeran plants and holograms of pemalite plants before and I knew that, while all of those places had life that could be broadly categorised as plantlike based on its general visual impression and tendency not to move around, there was a lot of variation in life around the galaxy. Earth plants all had a certain commonality of structure and colour variation; branches split in certain ways, veins ran through leaves, roots sank into the ground. These plants had those characteristics, and while it was perfectly possible that a different planet had hit on the same evolutionary tricks by pure chance, it was more likely that I was simply somewhere unfamiliar on Earth. I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten there, or where the others were. First step: look around. I closed my eyes and focused on the osprey within me.

After a couple of minutes, it became clear that nothing was happening. I tried wolf, horse, squirrel, hork bajir.

Nothing.

I couldn’t morph. I was alone in an unfamiliar place, and I couldn’t morph.


	11. Chapter 11

I woke up, paralysed. Everything was completely black, and I couldn’t do anything but breathe. My heart beat so fast it took me a little while to realise that it was beating at all as I tried to move, tried to scream.

It was sound that brought me back to reality. My father was whistling in the kitchen as he clattered about making a cup of tea. My father, my kitchen, my house. I was home. I’d been dreaming. It was dark because I’d shut all of the light out so that I could get a nap.

With that thought, I was able to relax enough to move. With trembling hands, I inspected my body. All whole. No bruises, scrapes, or missing teeth. I was in my pyjamas.

I got up and turned the light on. Everything looked completely normal. I closed my eyes and focused on the osprey; immediately, feathers drew themselves along my skin and sprang outward. I sat on the edge of my bed and started crying with relief.

I was no stranger to nightmares. Since becoming an Animorph, I’d had all sorts of them – stock-standard memory replays of nearly getting killed; worst-case-scenario fears where friends and family begged for me to save them as their heads were pushed down to the yeerk pool; symbolic scenes where somebody burned alive or vanished into time or was eaten and a voice told me that it was all my fault; nonsensical mishmashes built from things I’d experienced, things I’d been told about, and snippets of psychic messages left in my mind by various telepaths. They were universally awful, and as responsible for my terrible sleep patterns as any late-night missions were. But nothing, no pain or fear or guilt of any kind that my darkest imagination could dredge up, was as terrifying as that moment of standing on that strange beach and realising that somehow, for some reason, I couldn’t morph. I had faced certain death dozens of times, but I had never felt as helpless as I had in that moment.

Well, I must have, at some point. I must have felt like that before meeting Elfangor, right? Trapped in my own body? At the mercy of my own physical limitations, where every mistake or instance of bad luck had a chance to leave a permanent mark? What did it feel like, living before touching that cube? I couldn’t remember any more. Maybe I could ask David about it.

But right then, I had… what did I have to do right then? Guard duty with our Controller. Right. I had to head off for guard duty in about forty minutes. I could do some of my chores before then. I headed out to the barn, checked the animal charts, and fed the animals that needed feeding. We were low on dead mice; I made a note so that Dad could order more. While I worked, I tried to figure out what we were supposed to do about the world leader thing. No matter how I looked at it, there didn’t seem to be an easy way out; we could keep the war secret, or we could keep the leaders free. Not both. Were the leaders more dangerous as secret slaves in yeerk hands, or as scared, recently attacked parties who we’d just told about an alien invasion? I didn’t have a tenth of the information necessary to even guess at that sort of thing.

The whole thing made no sense. If the yeerks were in a position to pull this sort of thing off, we’d vastly underestimated their reach. They must have Pools all over the planet, unless they were planning to shuttle some of the most closely guarded people on the planet to their Pool ship every few days. Which meant… which meant that this had been in the works a lot longer than we’d had the morphing cube, or than they’d thought we had whatever superweapon I’d pretended to have in Australia, so maybe those things weren’t relevant after all, maybe we hadn’t forced their hand. If we had, if this was a panic move… then, well, maybe we should just let it play out? If they were doing this out of desperation because they thought we had more power than we did, then it would collapse on them when the lack of Yeerk Pool access became a problem. Right?

No, no; something was wrong. We’d destroyed their food supply before, we’d poisoned them, we’d crashed their undersea base, and we’d been little more than an annoyance this whole time. The yeerks were too good at secrecy to pull a move like this without having something in place to feed the new Controllers, meaning that their reach really must extend into a lot of countries. But then, why was Visser Three always hanging around our home town, the one place where ‘andalite bandits’ were there to foil his plans? Why not just start basing his plans at another Yeerk Pool far out of our reach? The Visser might be petty but he was a military leader; if he had somewhere safer to make his plans, he’d go there and make them, and leave our town for andalite hunting. Meaning that the yeerks couldn’t have big centres of operation elsewhere, so why risk high profile Controllers in other parts of the world?

We were missing something. I supposed we’d find out what it was eventually, especially if we failed to save the world leaders. I put the thought out of my head for the moment, grew wings, and headed out to our woodland shack.

David was in a tree in red-tailed hawk morph, watching our captive through a window.

<Anything interesting happen?> I asked him. He jumped at my voice.

<Nothing. Ever. This is the most boring guy alive. Yesterday he tried to run off into the woods, immediately got lost, and wouldn’t let me lead him back until it got dark and started to rain. That was the most interesting thing that’s happened since we brought him here. Now he just glares and throws rocks at any animal he sees.>

I settled onto the branch next to him. The Controller was sitting at the little table, playing solitaire with a pack of cards we’d left him. He didn’t seem to know the rules. He looked like he’d been crying.

<It’ll be over soon,> I said to David, more to reassure myself than him.

<Tobias says he’s got about five hours but it’s hard to be exact.>

<That soon?!> I’d assumed that it would be longer, for some reason.

<Yeah. You gonna stick around for the big show? No way I’d miss it.>

The ‘big show’?! I almost snapped at David, before reigning myself in. I had to remember that his parents had been taken, that he dreamed of starving their captors out and freeing them, just like Jake did with Tom, like Marco must with his mother, assuming she was still alive.

<I’ll be here if I’m needed,> was all I managed to say.

<Whelp, have a great time watching an old man lounge around,> David said. <I’m off to hang with the hork-bajir.> He took to the sky.

I settled down to watch. I didn’t have the best memories of that shack and in some ways, this was worse than the last time we’d starved a yeerk in it. Sure, I wasn’t watching my dear friend and leader try to pull our team apart with cruelty and violence, but… at least that had been enemy action, of a sort. War. We’d been saving one of our own from someone intent on enslaving us all. This was just a random Controller we’d kidnapped.

And it shouldn’t feel any different, I told myself sternly. The Controller was a slaver, his victim deserved freedom. Just because I didn’t know the victim personally didn’t mean he didn’t deserve freedom. And that yeerk would turn us in just as quickly, I was sure. Wasn’t I?

Peace could be made; Aftran had proven that. But we couldn’t make peace with every single yeerk individually. We could afford neither the time nor the risk, not when every failure had a real chance of getting us and our families all killed or enslaved. There were presumably redeemable and irredeemable yeerks tied up in this war; how many gambles could I make for the redeemable ones before one of the irredeemable ones got us killed?

This was still a war.


	12. Chapter 12

David, Ax, Tobias and I were there to witness the yeerk starve. The others were at home, presumably asleep. We didn’t send anyone to get them; they might need their sleep.

It wasn’t like it was with Jake. We’d had Jake sedated the whole time. This man muttered and paced around the shack, occasionally clawing at his face and screaming things like “Get out of my head!” I wanted to demorph, to rush over and comfort him, but I couldn’t. Even now, letting him see us as human would be too big a risk. Eventually, he stopped, collapsed to the floor, and started sobbing.

I flew in as an owl and projected comfort as best I could. I spoke to him soothingly, explaining where he was and what we could do for him now, while Tobias flew towards town to find a pay phone and call Rachel’s father.

David had enough money to buy him a bus ticket and give him some emergency funds. We gave him the code phrases he’d need to verify his identity with Rachel’s dad. We saw him off.

I went home. I was tired again, and glad of it. I didn’t want to think. I just wanted to go straight to sleep.

I couldn’t sleep. I went to the barn instead. Dad was cleaning cages. I grabbed a scrubbing brush to help.

“Hi there, sweetheart.”

“Hi, Dad.”

“You okay? You seem a bit down.”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. I was always ‘down’. My parents were always worried about it. We’d had this conversation a thousand times. “I’m fine. Hey, when are we releasing that merlin?”

“Probably Monday. He’s ready now, but I have a meeting tomorrow with a welfare organisation.”

“We can do it,” I said quickly.

“Hmm?”

“The environmental group, I mean. The release area is within walking distance. I’ve released animals before and I want to show them, but we’ll be in school Monday.”

“Oh. Okay, if you like. How strong are the boys in your group?”

“Strong enough to carry a merlin, I’m sure?”

“Well, that golden eagle needs releasing, too. You can take her as well if you want to show them something big and impressive.”

There was no reason not to take the eagle. I nodded. “Thanks.”

“I’m glad you have your little group, Cassie. It’s good to see you out there with close friends, doing something you believe in.”

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “It’s good to have them.”

The cleaning made me tired enough to sleep without drugs. The next day was a Sunday, the last day of the weekend, before we had school to worry about.

Also the last day before the world leaders started arriving. Two days before the summit. And we still didn’t have a plan.

“I still say we just smash the place up,” Rachel said as she carefully kept pace with Jake. The two were carrying the golden eagle’s cage between them. Golden eagles are big; one person can carry them, but not for long. And we were walking pretty far.

The merlin was in the cage in my arms. It wasn’t happy about all the movement, or the eagle for that matter.

Only Marco was birdless, trailing behind. We’d meet up with the others inside the forest.

“We know that wouldn’t work,” Jake said patiently. “We’ve been through this.”

“It would buy us time,” Rachel said. “Besides, maybe it has to happen here. They keep doing everything here. You’d think they’d just have done this in a separate town if they could.”

“They must have bases elsewhere if they’re planning to infest the world leaders,” I said. We’d been through that, too.

“Anyone else notice we’ve had this same conversation a million times?” Marco asked.

“It’s only been, like, four times,” Rachel said. “We keep talking about it because we don’t have a proper plan.”

“When has that ever stood in our way before?” Marco asked lightly.

“Rachel, if we don’t think of something better by the time the infestation plan is actually in progress, I’m sure it will quickly devolve into smashing the place up,” Jake said.

“We keep talking about it because it doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Something’s off. We’re missing something, or… assuming something wrong.”

“Trap,” Marco said automatically.

“Chee information,” Jake said tiredly, in the voice of someone who’s said it many times before. “If Erek wanted to get us killed, he has better ways of doing it.”

<What is that?!>

I jumped at Tobias’ thoughtspeak and scanned the sky for him. He was perched in a tree, barely above eye level. He was glaring at the eagle.

“It’s just an eagle we need to release,” I said.

<You’re not releasing it near my territory,> Tobias said flatly.

“This eagle’s only been at the centre a couple of days,” I said. “She has a very well established territory back in the mountains. She won’t be hanging around. But unless you want Marco to drive us up into the mountains...”

“What about the other bird?” David asked, striding into view as he pulled a tshirt on. Ax moved into view behind him.

“A merlin. It’s for you. It’s a good bird for action; very fast, very agile.”

David looked between the two birds. The merlin was about a quarter the size of the eagle, and shifting nervously. He seemed to be thinking.

“Faster than the eagle?” he asked.

<You don’t want to be a golden eagle,> Tobias said. <They’re jerks. They go after other birds. Not to mention anything from a rabbit to a small deer. I’m not kidding about that last one. I saw one take down a doe once. Landed on her head, sank in its talons, boom. Went down like she’d been shot.>

“I want to do the eagle,” David said immediately.

There was a pause.

“Any special reason?” Jake asked.

David crossed his arms. “Yeah. I have no home. No family. No future. I’ve been in town less than a week and this war has already taken everything from me. You tell me I can fight back, and so far I have the ability to turn into a bird who can’t kill much bigger than a rabbit – no offense, Tobias – and a little puppy dog. Now there’s this little bird that you guys say is great because it can dodge and flee? No. I want to kick butt.”

“It’s not always about sheer power,” Jake said. “A golden eagle is about as big as a bald eagle. We often get into trouble with Rachel’s bald eagle because of its size.”

“That bird has a seven-foot wingspan,” I pointed out.

“We do get in trouble for not having enough strength sometimes too, though,” Rachel pointed out. “If something needs to be airlifted, I’m the only one who can carry it. That’s caused problems before.”

Jake shot her a betrayed look. She shrugged.

“That’s less of a problem than the other way,” I cut in, giving Jake some support. “We don’t need to carry stuff that often, and when we do, we can usually find a way around it pretty easily.

Jake nodded. “Not being able to get away from a situation can mean death. We can’t take risks like that. This is a lot more complicated than just being the biggest, baddest animal.”

<Rachel can turn into an owl in those situations if she needs to,> Tobias pointed out to me privately. <And David has his morph of me if he ever needs it.> I glanced at him. He nonchalantly preened a wing.

“Does Jake tell you all what animals to morph?” David asked.

“I’m not telling you what to morph,” Jake said patiently. “It’s just that we have a lot of experience at this sort of thing and – ”

“If you’re not telling me what to morph, then I want the eagle,” David said.

Jake’s lips pressed together. A sign that he was starting to lose patience.

“Hey, guys,” Marco cut in. “I have a super complicated genius idea! What if...” he leaned in and glanced around in an exaggerated manner, as if about to share a great secret, before continuing in a stage whisper. “What if he acquires both birds?”

There was a few seconds of silence.

“Then he’d have three daylight bird morphs,” I pointed out.

“So what? Do we have a limit on birds? We’re here because him flying around looking like Tobias might invite questions, right? So he needs another one. You guys are all arguing about power versus agility when both are right here. I know we’re trying to be careful about running into some kind of morph limit, but we all have a bunch of morphs we’re never going to use again. David’s got some leeway here; if there’s a limit, we’ll hit it before he does. I don’t see why he can’t grab an extra bird.”

I glanced at Jake. He shrugged. “Okay. Merlin first.”

“Why?” David asked.

“Because if Cassie releases that eagle first, it’s going to eat the merlin,” Jake pointed out. “And also quite possibly you, when you morph the merlin.”

I opened the merlin cage. David put his hand inside. The merlin had been handled by humans a fair bit in the time it had spent with us; we tried not to let the animals get too habituated, but there’s only so much you can do when providing medical care. It let him lay his fingertips gently on its breast.

A few minutes later, a merlin took to the sky.

He did appreciate the agility.

<Hahaha! Oh, man! I thought flying was cool already, but this thing can really move!>

<It’s gotta make up for being puny somehow,> Tobias grumbled.

<Man, Tobias; you don’t like eagles, you don’t like merlins… are you bird-racist or something?>

<They’re different species, not different races,> Tobias said shortly. <Merlins are okay. They don’t go after hawks.>

<So you like wussy birds like ducks and swans and stuff, then?>

<Swans? Wussy? Have you ever met a swan? Those things will break your arm.>

“Are you ready to try the eagle?” Jake called, smiling.

<What?>

I put my hand on Rachel’s arm. We walked off into the trees. David couldn’t morph clothes yet, so it would be better if he didn’t have to demorph in front of us.

“This… could be going worse,” I said quietly once we were out of earshot.

Rachel shrugged. “We’ll see how we go with the summit thing, I guess.”

“You’re worried.”

“Aren’t you? Don’t you remember your first few battles? We were lucky; the enemy wasn’t prepared for us. Now they are.”

“We’re more experienced, though. He’s got us behind him.”

“His photo was on the front page of the paper this morning. Huge article, with a big reward for information and everything. The yeerks really, REALLY want that morphing cube.”

“We’re here to protect him.”

“Yeah. You got a plan for that?”

“No. You?”

“Nothing.”


	13. Chapter 13

We needed to finish rounding out David’s core set of morphs. There were no owls on hand, but I’d already collected a fly and cockroach. (He wasn’t happy about needing those.)

“So now he needs… what? Just a combat morph?” Jake asked.

<And a water morph,> Tobias said. <If you’re going to The Gardens, you might as well pick up a dolphin.> He said it hesitantly. Tobias hates water. He’s not the greatest fan of morphing in general, after getting trapped, but he especially hates morphing water animals; it’s difficult to demorph to hawk without drowning. Red-tailed hawks are not known for their aquatic ability.

“I can’t go to The Gardens,” he pointed out. “My mum works there.”

That was a good point. We could always fly in as birds after hours – we had clothes stashed inside The Gardens for that purpose – but there was still the chance of running into a security guard or late worker, and David was a missing person who the yeerks were very, very interested in finding.

<Can we not simply have him acquire a human and enter through the gate?> Ax asked.

“Oh!” David said. “Yeah, I have a human morph.”

A pause.

“Um,” Marco said. “When?”

“I acquired that old Controller dude while he was sleeping,” he said with a shrug.

Another pause.

“What?!” Marco hissed. “He could have seen you! You put the whole group in danger when you – ”

“Marco, chill. He was asleep.”

“We, uh,” I cut in, “generally don’t acquire people without their permission. Birds and horses and stuff are one thing but when it comes to humans and sapient aliens, it’s kind of… immoral to go around stealing their bodies.”

“The yeerks stole his body way worse,” David said with a shrug.

“That doesn’t give us permission to do it,” I countered.

“Jesus, Cassie, I didn’t hurt him. He’ll never even know. Aren’t we fighting a war against alien slavers here?”

“Can we deal with this later?” Jake asked. “That guy was about my Dad’s size. I’ll sneak out some of his clothes and get you some money and you can go through the gate and meet us inside after school tomorrow. Then we wait until closing and get your morphs.”

“That’s cutting it close,” Marco said. “Day after tomorrow is this summit. Shouldn’t we be scouting or planning or something?”

“If you have a plan for what to do about that, let me know,” Jake said. “We don’t need to send everyone with David.”

“I’ll scout the hotel again,” Tobias volunteered. “See if anything changes or whatever.”

Jake nodded. “I’ll come with you. And Ax and Rachel, if you can. Marco and Cassie, you go with David.”

I glanced at Marco. He frowned. He’d probably noticed the same thing that I had. Jake’s choices mostly made sense – Ax and Rachel were good to have on hand if there was some kind of conflict with Controllers, and Tobias was an obvious choice for any scouting mission. Besides, Ax might have some alien insight into any yeerk behaviour that we couldn’t figure out. And I could see why he’d picked me, who everyone always came to for morphing stuff, to be in the acquiring mission. But I’d expected him to want to keep an eye on David himself, and if you were going on a mission where caution and the ability to quickly respond to unknown situations was the key, you wanted Marco for that.

“You’re not coming to The Gardens?” I asked Jake.

He shook his head. “Not unless you need me. I want eyes on this building, anyway.” He glanced at David and cleared his throat. “Look, David, I know you don’t want to hear this, but if your mother’s there...”

“She won’t be after hours,” he said. “And I know.”

“We’ll probably only get one chance to rescue them. We need to do it right.”

“Yeah. I’m not an idiot.”

Jake nodded. The meeting broke up. We went home.

Those of us who had homes, anyway.


	14. Chapter 14

It wasn’t until Marco, David and I were actually in the park the next day that I realised why Jake hadn’t come. He hadn’t wanted to have another fight with David over his choice of morphs.

I could see the logic. I didn’t necessarily like it. He probably figured that it didn’t matter so much if David got into a fight with me or Marco, but Jake didn’t want any Animorphs saying ‘no’ to him and going their own way. Jake had never exactly had to contest for control of the group; we’d all made him the leader whether he liked it or not. We might fight and disagree and run off on our own sometimes, but we always came back to the group. David was still an unknown element. If there was going to be trouble, Jake probably figured that it was better for it to fall with Marco or me than him, so he could sweep in and be the strong, implacable peacekeeper later.

Was I being too suspicious? Was I being unfair to Jake? Possibly. I’d read a bunch of stuff into his decision to send me on the last mission, stuff that hadn’t been there at all. Maybe he really did just want a look at the summit venue. Maybe he’d sent us essentially at random. It wasn’t like anything else was making a lot of sense recently.

David, in the guise of the old Controller, had no problem getting into the park. Marco and I were seagulls to save ourselves the entrance fee.

<So,> Marco asked, <thought about what animal you want for battle?>

<Uh, what do people have so far, again?>

<Tobias and Ax go in their own bodies,> I said. <Unless the situation’s bad for birds, in which case Tobias is a hork-bajir. Jake’s a tiger, Marco’s a gorilla. Rachel’s usually a grizzly bear but she can be an elephant if we need bulk. I use a leopard these days, but I’m pretty experienced with a wolf, too.>

<So you guys already took most of the cool ones,> he said, sounding disappointed.

<It’s not like there’s a one-Animorph limit,> I said. <You can morph the same animal. So long as the zoo has it.>

<Except gorilla. I have dibs on gorilla.>

<Pfft, nothing cool about a fat monkey,> David said.

<Fat? My gorilla morph isn’t fat. Big Jim eats a healthy diet of seasonal fruits. Probably.>

<What’s the most dangerous animal in the zoo?> David asked.

<Um,> I said, <that’s a matter of opinion. Dangerous how?>

<You know. For kicking butt in combat.>

<Yeah, that kind of depends on how the battle is going. Rachel’s morphs are great for sheer power, but her elephant’s bulk and bear’s eyesight can be a real hinderance. Tobias is fragile in the air, but he can get anywhere, see anything and has saved our lives several times by dropping in out of nowhere. Marco’s got the bulk problem but his strength and hands really come in handy sometimes.>

<Aww, you admire my hands,> Marco said.

I ignored this. <They all have strengths and drawbacks. How do you want to fight?>

<Something big and strong, I think. None of this dodging around, one blow from death garbage. I want to kick butt.>

Great, another Rachel.

We were moving slowly through the zoo as we talked, but David suddenly stopped, looking into an exhibit. He grinned.

Rhinocerous.

<They’re pretty close to blind,> I told him. <You’d have trouble even finding an enemy in battle with a morph like that. You’d just find yourself getting burned with Dracon fire from enemies you can’t see.>

<Pity.> He wandered over to a zoo map and inspected it for a few seconds. <Okay. I got one.>


	15. Chapter 15

We waited for the zoo to close, then waited another thirty minutes for most of the staff to leave, before I demorphed and threw on some outer clothes from our stash. With Marco in my sleeve as a wolf spider, I led a still-disguised David into the service tunnels that linked the exhibits.

“There are security guards,” I mumbled, “so we have to be careful.”

David laughed. “What kind of moron would get caught by a security guard?”

“Hush. This way.” I led him towards the lions.

The Gardens had four lions; a big, golden male called Hercules, and three lionesses; Nala, Ilanga and Agnes. David, predictably, chose Hercules.

It’s very dangerous to approach a lion, but I’d been an Animorph a long time. I wasn’t worried. David, of course, was another story. While David demorphed, I opened the first door to the exhibit (there are two, like an airlock, and one has to be closed all the time to stop animals from wandering into the corridors) and called the lions over with the low whistle that the handlers gave at feeding times. They all looked over. We didn’t actually have any food for them. I pulled one of my sleeves carefully out of the way to avoid staining it and bit my arm hard, breaking the skin. I worried the wound to draw a lot of blood, then stuck it through a little hatch in the door.

Next to me, David went white.

Hercules and Nala both wandered over. Hercules took the lead as they approached; lion prides usually let their breeding males eat first. I pulled my arm away as he reached the door.

“Go on,” I said. “He’s gentle.” This wasn’t exactly true, but I was pretty sure he wouldn’t hurt David.

Glancing at me doubtfully, David carefully reached through and placed a hand on Hercules’ mane. Hercules paid him absolutely no attention. He was still staring at my arm.

David swallowed, and closed his eyes. Hercules closed his.

Moments later, we were closing the door and heading out.

“Okay,” I whispered. “Couple of minutes for Marco to demorph, we head for the dolphins, then we’re out of here. Easy.”

David immediately headed for the dolphin tank.

“Hey!” I hissed. “What about Marco?”

“Can’t he demorph when we’re putting wings on?” David asked. “I want to get out of here. I’m too tired to keep turning into that guy and my mom works here.” He marched off. I followed.

<What’s going on?> Marco asked. I lifted my sleeve to me face and mumbled an explanation as I jogged after David.

<Oh for… whatever.>

The dolphins were friendly animals. They were used to dealing with humans who had fish for them. When they saw us, one of them – Joey, I think – immediately swam over to beg for fish. The others weren’t far behind.

“Which is the best dolphin?” David asked.

I shrugged. “They’re all just dolphins. They’re about the same.”

David reached out to touch Joey’s nose.

“Hey, you kids!”

We both jumped, and spun to face the security guard. I scrambled for a way to explain this. Me and David, both kids of workers there… but David was dressed in clothes several sized too big for him and, oh yeah, was very publically a missing person with a huge reward attached to him…

<Run, you idiots!> Marco snapped.

We ran. I went right. David went left.

The security guard hesitated for a split second, then turned to chase David. No!

“I’ll get the stash home safe, bro! Run!” I yelled in my best teen thug voice. The security guard immediately changed direction. I ran.

<What was that?> Marco asked incredulously.

“I was getting his attention,” I whispered into my sleeve as I ran.

<‘The stash’?>

I didn’t respond. I wasn’t exactly fit, and wasn’t going to waste my breath being sarcastic with Marco. I knew the zoo, but so did the security guard. He looked about thirty and was much fitter than I was. It took about three minutes before I felt his hand grip my forearm.

I turned and flung a wolf spider at his face.

“Aaargh!” the man screamed, letting me go to paw at his face.

<Aaaargh!> Marco screamed as he dodged fingers. <Cassie, why?!>

“Aaaargh!” I screamed, to feel included, as I ran, dodged around a corner, rolled into a haha ditch, and stayed very still and quiet.

I could have morphed in the ditch, but that would have meant leaving clothes behind. Instead, I very carefully snuck back around to our clothing stash before taking to the air. By the time I was up, an owl and a golden eagle were waiting for me.

<You threw me at someone’s face,> Marco said reproachfully.

<Sorry,> I said.

<Oh, well that’s okay then. Maybe next mission I can throw you at someone’s face. Then we’ll be even.>

<Sounds fair to me. You guys okay?>

<I am now.>

<I didn’t get the dolphin.>

<We’ll come back for it another time. I’m sure we won’t need it for this mission.>

<It’s a seaside resort, Cassie,> Marco groaned. <Don’t say things like that.>


	16. Chapter 16

It was time.

It was time for terrible plan to become terrible reality, and none of us were happy about it. The whole thing still didn’t make sense to me; the mere fact that this event was even happening meant that pretty much everything we’d assumed about the yeerks on earth was wrong. If they were going to infest the world leaders, how did they expect to feed their yeerks? If they had the pools to do so, why did they keep operating from our town? If the invasion was, well, that much bigger than we’d predicted, we should’ve noticed by now. Something was wrong. But there was no more time to plan.

Save the world leaders. Worry about what it means later. That was all we could do.

The hall for the ceremony was surprisingly easy to get into. We’d become used to dealing with Controllers who were suspicious of every insect, but this hall was filled with Earth security personnel from a variety of countries who were getting in the way of the yeerks a lot more than they were getting in our way. Admittedly, we had to be careful because we didn’t know how many of them were Controllers, but all in all the whole thing seemed to work in our favour.

While we’d been collecting morphs for David, the others had scouted the building again, and we had a plan. Sort of. We had the semblance of a plan. I was pretty sure that it counted as treason.

We flew in through the window, seven harmless little flies, and got into position. We all quickly spread out of each others’ sight, heading for our individual posts. Rachel and Marco headed for the sight-blocking pillar.

<We are inside the pillar hologram, Prince Jake,> Ax reported. <You were correct; the entire pillar is hollow, and there is a portable yeerk pool in here.>

<You know the plan,> Jake said. <Eagle, snake, and be ready for Visser Three.>

<I don’t want to fight Visser Three without claws or tusks,> Rachel grumbled.

<You’re not supposed to fight him, you’re supposed to be ready to drop a snake on him. Is there somewhere in there to perch?>

<Yeah, yeah.>

<Besides, I’ve seen those eagle talons. You’ll be fine. David, you in here under the stage yet?>

<I think so.>

<Good, start demorphing. There should be enough room for two big cats, but they’re not going to like being close together, so don’t lose control and attack me.>

<I did practice this morph, you know.>

<Really? In a confined space with a tiger?>

David didn’t reply.

<Cassie, Marco, Tobias?>

<Ready for your command, Fearless Leader.>

<I’ve got eyes on the outside and nothing looks amiss.>

<Yeah, I’m ready.> I finished my morph, the silky fur of a leopard crawling over my feline frame. It’s not easy to hide a bunch of animals in a high security government meeting, and the timing was tight, since we’d have to demorph every couple of hours. Rachel and Marco were safe inside a hologram pillar, Jake and David concealed under the stage itself, and Tobias still outside, but finding somewhere to put a gorilla and a leopard so that we could clear an exit path for any escaping civilians hadn’t been easy.

Fortunately, it had turned out that the real pillars, being decorative, didn’t reach all the way to the ceiling, and I was nestled on top of one of them. Leopards are tree-climbing cats; I had no great concerns about my ability to get down. Marco’s gorilla morph was a bit too heavy and too big to safely fit on a pillar, so he was instead having to make do with a less orthodox morph.

<I still don’t see why I have to be a skunk,> he grumbled.

<We’re the escape plan for the bystanders,> I pointed out. <Can you think of anything that can clear the building faster?>

It had all been remarkably easy. The building had been scoured from top to bottom by multiple security teams, a guarding perimeter surrounded it, and we’d just flown right in and set up inside the nice, clean, confirmed safe building.

The leaders and their security teams filed in. I stayed still. Leopards are good at staying still. Everyone sat down, a process that somehow took nearly half an hour. Some official-looking woman I didn’t recognise approached the stage and started making a long introductory speech.

<Ax,> Jake said. <Go.>

<Leaders of the planet Earth,> Ax announced in private thoughtspeak to the leaders and Animorphs, <for the safety of your planet, it is vitally important that you do not react in any way to what I am telling you.>

The world leaders, for their part, remained remarkably composed. They looked discomfited, certainly, and one or two glanced around wildly, searching for the source of voiceless sound. Nearly all of them glanced at their security, who didn’t react at all.

<My name is _aristh_ Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthil of the andalite military. I am an alien soldier, and I am here to protect you. Your planet is under attack from a species of aggressive colonists –  >

The speech on the stage went on, and the leaders mostly sat stock-still, as they absorbed Ax’s telepathic speech. It was a good speech. It didn’t mention us, of course, but he showed them a mental image of a yeerk and was partway through explaining their basic biology when the introductory speech on the stage ended. The world leaders took a few seconds to realise the speech was over and join in with the applause. It seemed to be going well. If we could just convince them enough to get them all out safely…

It was going really well. No panic, no exclamations of disbelief; nobody had asked their security staff to look for hidden microphones.

I’d explained the invasion to people before. People didn’t react like this.

<This isn’t right,> Rachel said. <Something’s – >

And then, quite suddenly, we were completely surrounded by hork-bajir.

Human-Controllers melted away, the fake world leaders pulling parts off their costumes as they retreated behind the wall of hork-bajir.

<Trap,> Jake groaned in our minds. <Of course it’s a trap.>

Of course it was a trap. We were so stupid. We’d known all along, hadn’t we, that it didn’t make any sense? Why take the leaders like this? How would they feed them? If they could feed them, why do it here? It was top secret, but we’d foiled their secret plans before. They must have expected us to find them, and set this up to ambush us.

<This still isn’t right,> Marco said. <It’s too elaborate for the payoff. There are too many holes in it to – >

But he stopped talking as a sickening wave of terror washed over us; the personal aura of Visser Three. My fur stood up; I extended my claws automatically.

<What’s happening out there?> David hissed, terrified.

<It’s okay, David,> I said soothingly. <We’re going to get out of here, okay?>

<Fools,> Visser Three said as he strode into the room, his andalite hooves clicking delicately on the polished wooden floor as he slowly walked up the room towards the stage. <Did you honestly think that your feint with the _sh’krenik_ would keep us fooled? Did you honestly expect to force us into such desperation as this? We have conquered a dozen worlds, and you so rarely manage to stop us. Why did you think that here would be any different? Come now. Surrender, or die like warriors.> He mounted the stage. We stayed silent. The Visser sighed.

<Must we really wait about for two hours? I have a busy schedule, you know.>

<He’s got a point,> Jake said. <You guys smell that? They’re already fumigating the place.>

<They’re poisoning us?!> David asked.

<No, it’s bug spray. They do this so we can’t infiltrate. They’re stopping us from escaping as bugs.>

<So what do we do?!>

<Get ready to fight. Stay with the group. We’ll get you out. Dammit, we’re not in the right morphs for this. There are too many hork-bajir for this! Marco?>

<Is Ax demorphing yet?> Marco asked while Visser Three continued to gloat and threaten.

<Almost done,> he said.

<Rachel needs to break a window for Tobias. Cassie, how well can big cats smell?>

<Not nearly as well as hork-bajir.>

<Okay, I need you to carry me to the door. We’ll clear a path for the others.>

<Sounds good,> Jake said. <You ready for a real fight, David?>

<Can’t wait,> David lied.

The Visser walked across the stage, stalk eyes scanning the room. <Come now, andalites, this confrontation had to happen someday,> he said, his voice suddenly gentle. <So why not – > quicker than even my leopard eyes could follow, he struck out with his tailblade, slicing at the floor of the stage. Wood splintered up, exposing Jake. <Now?>

And then everything was chaos.

The stage exploded with big cats, Jake and David a team of roaring, slashing, biting monsters from which Visser Three quickly retreated, slashing with his tail. Neither he nor any of the hork-bajir carried Dracon beams, but the hork-bajir didn’t rush forward; they maintained a wall of blades around the room while Ax leapt from the holographic pillar and Rachel flew for the nearest window. I leapt for Marco’s pillar, took him up gently in my jaws, and climbed down.

Rachel did not run head-first into the window and brain herself. She rolled her body through the air at the last moment, hitting it with her back and crashing through in a shower of glass. Seconds later, Tobias hopped through the hole, Rachel right behind him. I couldn’t tell if she was badly hurt or not.

My job was to get everyone out as quickly as possible. I bolted for the door, dropped Marco, then turned and bolted in the opposite direction.

<Head for the emergency exit in a calm and orderly fashion!> Marco announced as he sprayed the wall of hork-bajir once, twice, three times. Hork-bajir bellowed and fell back, clawing at their faces.

At least, a few hork-bajir did. Most of them stepped forward, tightening their wall, raising their blades.

<Uh...> Marco mumbled, waddling back towards us. Skunks aren’t fast movers.

<Rachel, Tobias, outside,> Jake said tersely. They took to the air. Visser three and some of the hork-bajir watched them go, but without dracon beams, they couldn’t do much about it.

<Guess they couldn’t smuggle alien weapons in here, huh,> David commented, almost delirious with terror.

<They smuggled a bunch of aliens in here, you idiot,> Marco pointed out. <Look at them! This is practically an army! This is a literal army; the last time I saw this many hork-bajir in one place was Leera!>

The Visser looked puzzled. One stalk eye remained trained on the broken window while the other scanned us. His main eyes locked on David. He flicked his gaze to me, to Marco, and then back to David.

<One of you are new,> he said. <It is you, yes?>

<Don’t answer him,> Jake said tersely. <We don’t talk to him. Only Ax talks to him.>

<I was going to offer you a deal, but if you are somehow getting reinforcements to Earth then...> Visser Three froze. He stared. His main eyes locked onto Jake. And then something, a strange sensation, permeated the air.

Joy, surprise… no, amusement. Real, genuine amusement.

And Visser Three started laughing.

He huffed air from his nose while the musical rhythm of andalite thought-speak laughter filled our minds. It wasn’t the cold, sadistic cackle he sometimes gave while chasing us down. It was the true joy of somebody who had found something genuinely, amazingly funny.

<What’s happening right now?> Marco asked nervously. <What’s going on?>

<What’s happening in there?!> Rachel asked from outside. <Do you guys need backup?>

Visser Three turned his main attention back to the lion, and smiled. <Come here, David,> he said. <I believe that I have something to offer you.>


	17. Chapter 17

<Don’t respond,> Jake said tersely. <David, stay where you are. Don’t react.>

Slowly, David stepped forward, toward the Visser.

<He’ll kill you, you idiot!> Jake growled.

<I have your family, David,> the Visser said. <I can give them back to you. Happy and free.> His eyes locked back on Jake. <Unlike these uptight fools.>

Jake snarled.

<This must be a real blow to your pride, andalite. Not only did your precious technology fall into the hands of an alien, but he somehow activated it before you could retrieve it, didn’t he? Of course you would have no choice but to bring him on board then. Well, I can remove that little thorn from your side and make everybody happy. See, David, our kind have no such compunctions about sharing. We understand that every individual is a part of something bigger. With us, you can have true value, respect and safety – and, of course, your family. Frankly I’m surprised these andalites didn’t simply kill you – that’s what they do with inconvenient aliens, you know.>

<Lies!> Ax snarled venomously.

<Oh, the _aristh_ speaks, > the Visser said mildly. <You aren’t a part of this, little one. Hush.>

<David, he’s lying to you,> I said urgently. <We’ll get out of this, we’ll find your parents...> I glanced around the room at the hork-bajir. Most of them stoically held the perimeter, blades ready. A handful shuffled, tense, eyes on the Visser. Two of them rubbed at their faces and whimpered, presumably due to the smell of skunk musk. The scent had drifted across the hall a little and we could smell it from the stage; I wasn’t looking forward to charging through it on our way out. Especially since the hork-bajir still guarded the exit.

I glanced at Jake. He wasn’t paying much attention to the scene with David. He, too, was scanning the hork-bajir. <Cassie, is there a way to be… immune to skunk musk?> he asked.

<Not unless they have no sense of smell,> I said. <Is that really what matters right now?>

<Unless you can think of why they have so many hork-bajir in here and didn’t bring any guns, then yeah,> he said.

I didn’t have time to talk him out of whatever he was preoccupied with. David was at the Visser’s side. Visser Three smiled wider.

<It’s a hologram,> Jake said suddenly, urgently.

<What is?> Maroc asked.

<The hork-bajir! That’s why there are so many, and why they haven’t fought us, and why they don’t have weapons! Look at them. Their movements on each side of the hall are symmetrical!>

Ax scanned his stalk eyes down both sides of the hall at once. <Prince Jake is right,> he confirmed.

<So we’re here with a handful of hork-bajir and the Visser?> Marco asked. <Right. We have a chance, then.>

<A chance?> Rachel said, landing in the broken window. <We can kick these guys’ butts. Come on.>

I sidled up to Marco, ready to pick him up at a moment’s notice.

<David,> I said privately, <what he’s offering you is – >

<Absolute garbage, I know,> David said, as Visser Three reached out to put a hand on his big shaggy head.

David bit his hand off.

<Yaaargh!> Visser Three screamed in shock and pain, pulling back. His tailblade lanced forward, but in his second of shock, David had leapt out of range and was bolting, with the rest of us, for the door. Behind us, Rachel and Tobias delayed the few real hork-bajir.

<It’s a trap!> David said as we bolted outside.

<Oh, really?!> Marco growled. <You think it might possibly be a trap? It took you this long to realise – >

<Not for us, you moron!> David snapped. <For the spy!>

<The what now?> I asked.

<You’ve obviously got someone feeding you yeerk intel from inside the Empire. There’s a pretty good chance that they’re already dead.>


	18. Chapter 18

We all dashed for hidden places to demorph.

<David,> I said privately as my shoulders readjusted and my skull flattened, <about what happened in there...>

<I know, right? I didn’t expect to fool him so easily! I even fooled you guys! I wanted to get a killing blow, but that andalite tail is nasty.>

I digested this. <Why didn’t you tell us you were faking?> I said after a few seconds.

<Because genuine reactions are more believable than acting? Anyway, I didn’t think I’d have to – did you really expect me to take that lying slaver seriously?>

<Of course not! I just, uh...>

<I’m just messing with you, Cassie. It’s okay, I forgive you. I know I’m still new here.>

My thought-speak cut out. I finished demorphing and focused on owl. When I could thought-speak again, I said, <You should’ve told us about your plan. We couldn’t escape with you staying with the Visser. We can make much more effective plans if we’re all on the same page.>

<Ah. Gotcha. Sorry.>

I tried to focus on my morph. David might just be a really good actor, but he’d seemed pretty sincere when he’d gone to Visser Three. Or was I imagining that? He hadn’t really said anything, he’d just… walked over. So maybe me thinking that he looked like he was going to betray us, well, maybe that was on me.

It was hard not to notice that he hadn’t attacked the Visser until we’d had a strong, viable escape plan, but… well, that would be the best time to attack him even if he’d been on our side the whole time, right? He hadn’t mentioned that Erek was in danger until he’d switched back; was that because he’d been keeping the information from us, planning to work with the yeerks, or did the information not occur to him until we were escaping?

Erek, I needed to be focusing on saving Erek. I took to the sky. Not long after, the rest joined me. We headed for Erek’s place.

<So why is Er – our spy in danger?> Jake asked. <What can we expect?>

<They’re probably either torturing him for information or they’ve already killed him,> David said.

I tried to fly faster.

<Why do you think that?> Jake repeated.

<Okay,> David said. <Look. Imagine you have a spy in the Animorphs, somebody feeding information to the yeerks. You don’t know who it is. How would you find out?>

<I’d call a meeting and ask,> Jake said, sounding puzzled. <Someone doing something like that on their own would be absurdly dangerous. The whole team needs to know so we know what the goal is and we can work our plans around it.>

<Well they wouldn’t just tell you, would they?> David asked.

<I would,> I said. <Like Jake said, the last thing we want is dangerous, complicated private little plans that are at cross-purposes with other missions. That’s how you get people killed.>

<Guys, he means a spy,> Marco said. <As in someone betraying us.>

<Oh,> Jake said. <I’d ask Tobias and Ax to follow the main suspects, then work our way through the others until we find the culprit.>

<What if we’re the spies?> Tobias asked.

<Impossible. No Animorph would betray us, but it’s conceivable that one of us might try something a little shady if our family were threatened, if it was safe enough. The yeerks have no way to threaten or control you two.>

Tobias was silent. I couldn’t tell if Jake had offended him or not.

<I wouldn’t try anything shady,> Rachel said indignantly.

<Rachel, the amount of times you’ve gone off-mission – >

<The way to find a spy,> David cut in, probably sensing that this conversation would go on forever if he let it, <is to feed it.>

<What do you mean?> I asked.

<Okay, say Jake isn’t sure whether me, or Cassie, or Marco is a spy. What he does is, he get some big, juicy bit of information that the yeerks can’t possibly ignore, a big opportunity that can’t be passed up, and he puts it somewhere that each of us can find it. But the thing is, he feeds each of us a slightly different story.>

<And then he sees which one the yeerks act on!> Marco said. <Right, yeah. So this whole thing...>

<It didn’t make sense because it was a trap,> I said. <And it didn’t really make sense as a trap because it wasn’t a trap for us. The Visser wasn’t trying to capture or kill us, he was trying to delay us while the yeerks rooted out the spy. And by showing up, we just told him exactly who the spy was.>

<He probably had a bunch of different summit dates to feed different suspects,> Jake muttered. <Dammit. Okay, we track him down and save him. His dad might have some information.>

<He’s already dead,> David insisted. <He would’ve given you guys up by now, you should be trying to get your families out.>

<He won’t give us up,> Marco said.

<You can’t know that! People don’t hold up to torture as well as they think they will, and if they infest him – >

<David. Dude. We don’t have time to go into the hows and whys right now, so you’re just going to have to trust me,> Marco said. <Erek’s different. He’s… unusual, in form and in priorities. He won’t give us up.>

We were approaching Erek’s house. Marco swooped down.

<Anyone home?!> he called. <We’re here to help.>

Erek appeared at the door, looking very puzzled.

<Erek!> Marco landed on his letterbox. <That is you, right? Are you okay?>

“I’m fine,” he said. “What’s going on?”

<Thank goodness,> I said.

<Erek, you and your dad might need to disappear for a bit,> Jake said.

He nodded. “Easy. Why?”

<The summit was a trap. Not for us, they’re weeding out spies. They’re tracking down who told us and – >

The colour left Erek’s face. “I didn’t find that information,” he whispered. “Jenny did.” His eyes went distant for a moment, then sharpened. “She’s not on the chee-net,” he said, his voice trembling. “She – ”

<Where was she last seen?> Rachel asked.

“At work. She works at a gas station across from the McDonald’s down the roa – ”

<Yeerk McDonald’s,> Tobias said. <Let’s go.>

We took to the air.

<Is there a way to block a chee from the chee-net?> I asked Marco privately as we flew.

<I don’t know,> he said grumpily. <Why does anyone assume I know anything about chee? But, I mean, they’re a super ancient race of intelligent androids, with technology miles ahead of even the yeerks. You saw those shoddy repeating yeerk holograms compared to chee holograms.>

<But there might be a way to block it,> I insisted.

<Frankly, I hope there isn’t.>

<What?! How can you say that?! The only other explanation is that she’s – >

<Dead, yeah. You know what’s worse than a dead chee?>

<What?>

<A yeerk Empire who has learned enough about the chee to think to block their communications.>

We flew on. The McDonald’s came into view. It was closed.

<This place is 24-hour,> Marco said. <Like any McDonald’s should be.>

<Tobias and Marco in front,> Jake commanded. <They might still have a trap for us.>

The rest of us slowed a little while Tobias and Marco circled the building.

<Looks empty from the front,> Marco said. <I don’t hear anything, either.>

<Looks empty through the drive-through window,> Tobias added. <They probably would have moved her to – oh, no.>

I flew over to him. He was peering into a small, high bathroom window, and on the floor of the bathroom was a teenage girl, hands bound behind her, lying on her stomach. So far as I could tell, it looked exactly like Jenny, although it was tricky to be sure. Partly because she was face-down.

Mostly because there was just an ugly burn mark on the bathroom floor where her head should have been.

  



	19. Chapter 19

<She’s dead,> I said hollowly. <We’re too late.>

<She’s not dead,> Marco said. <We need to rescue her.>

<Marco, she doesn’t have a – >

<Her hologram is still up,> he told me urgently, privately. <She’s altered it to be headless, so she must still be aware.>

<Right,> I said, feeling stupid. <Of course.>

<Get David out of here,> Jake told me urgently. <Don’t let him see a mess like this.> To the group at large, he said, <Cassie, David, circle the area, keep an eye out for backup. Tobias, you’re our eyes above the building. Rachel, Ax, Marco – battle morphs. No time to waste.>

I pulled back from the building, my mind racing. How badly was Jenny hurt? They must have hit her in the head with a Dracon beam strong enough to destroy a human head – how much punishment could a chee take? Could they heal, or… repair? They must be able to, to have survived for so long. Maybe they didn’t have any vital systems in their heads. But if she wasn’t on chee-net, then that meant they must have destroyed her ability to contact the others, right? Except her hands were bound, so she must have been captured before being shot, so why didn’t she call for help then?

<So what’s our job out here?> David asked. <Drift around uselessly and give a yell if we see anything?>

<Yeah,> I said, distracted. <So keep sharp. We need to be able to tell ordinary civilians from… I dunno, anything weird.>

<This is stupid. We should be in the battle with everyone else. We’re useless out here.>

<Are you eager to get in another fight?> I snapped. I forced myself to calm down. None of this was David’s fault. He was new, Jake didn’t want to throw him into a battle he couldn’t handle yet, and that meant I had to babysit him. Not his fault, not Jake’s, not mine. Just the way things were. As much as I wanted to be actually helping.

Besides, we wouldn’t even know about Jenny if it weren’t for David.

<Come on, Cassie. This is a pointless job.>

<Jake said – >

<Jake can do what he wants, but I didn’t sign up to babysit his girlfriend.>

Before I could react to this, David wheeled around and flew back towards the McDonald’s. I followed, thought-speaking a warning to the others as soon as I was close enough to hear the battle. David was already demorphing in an alley by the time I got there.

I was going to have to protect him. I was going to have to get involved. I landed on the roof. Wolf or leopard? Technically, the leopard was more powerful, but its strengths wouldn’t really come into play in a confined space like a McDonald’s bathroom, and I was more experienced at the wolf…

I finished demorphing about the same time that David did. He’d had a head start, but I was faster. David grew to human size and kept growing, golden fur creeping along his skin.

I was thinking about this wrong. The primary goal was getting Jenny out of there. I might need hands. Hork-bajir.

I grew. My skin thickened.

By the time I dropped down from the roof and kicked in the door, the main dining area of the McDonald’s was chaos. The battle was surprisingly quiet – neither the yeerks nor us wanted to draw attention from the neighbourhood. Rachel silently swiped at a Dracon-wielding human controller with her left paw, her right having been burned away. A hork-bajir controller darted between her and the human to slash at her arm. Jake and Marco had taken hold of Jenny with tiger jaws and big gorilla hands while Tobias darted about in the confined space, acting as a distraction but not able to get enough space to fight properly. Marco could only hold onto her with one hand, the other busy holding a deep slash on his belly closed. Ax was holding off two hork-bajir controllers with his tail, pressing them into a corner. One dashed past him, flinging out an arm to slice open Ax’s flank; I tackled them.

Then, behind me, the powerful roar of a lion.

I’d always thought of Jake’s roar as powerful, but a tiger is nothing to a lion. The windows shook. Everyone, controller and Animorph alike, stood back. Jenny’s hologram flickered.

<Get her out of here, before the controllers see!> Tobias said, dropping onto the human-controller’s arm and biting his hand, forcing him to drop the Dracon beam. Fortunately, the controllers weren’t looking at Jenny. A lion can be pretty distracting.

The hork-bajir I’d tackled leapt for David. Without hesitation, David leapt straight for his throat, jaws clamping down. The hork-bajir went limp.

<Good work,> Jake said, <keep him busy. Cassie, help us over here!>

I leapt across the room, grabbing Jenny’s arm. Wow, chee were heavy. How did they manage to walk on the beach or sit in a bus without being noticed? Marco probably could have handled her if he wasn’t injured, but busy holding his guts in, it took everything he, Jake and I had to scootch the android across the floor.

<Jenny,> I said privately, <can you hear me? We’re here to help; we’re going to get you out of here, okay? Everything’s going to be fine. Just keep the hologram up a little longer; you’re almost safe.>

There was no response.

<What’s our plan once we get her outside?> I asked Jake.

<One thing at a time,> Jake said, which I took to mean that there was no plan whatsoever.

We’d have to come up with one fast. We were six feet from the door.

Five feet.

Then the door flew open, and a human-controller charged in and shot Rachel right in the chest.


	20. Chapter 20

Rachel dropped like a stone. I could see where the fur on her chest had burned away.

Jake dropped Jenny; he and Tobias flew straight for the new controller, who stood back to allow four new hork-bajir to charge in. She was wearing, I noticed, a McDonald’s uniform, and wearing a name badge, although I couldn’t read it.

“You are making a mess of my establishment!” she screamed as she stepped back. “I will not tolerate this!”

While David and Ax kept fighting the original hork-bajir, Jake and Tobias were confronted with the new ones. There were seven hork-bajir controllers and two human-controllers in the McDonald’s by that point, and one of the human-controllers was still armed. That was far too many to deal with. Nevertheless, I found myself letting go of Jenny (Marco grunted as the chee’s entire weight was dumped on his one good arm) and leapt for Rachel.

A patch of fur was burned clean away, the bear skin beneath red and blistered. A Dracon beam could cut straight through her on the highest setting; the controller must have intentionally lowered it to stun. But had she succeeded? The blast was more severe than what would be used to stun a human; what if she’d stopped her heart by accident or something? I pawed at her chest, wondering how to take a bear’s pulse with hork-bajir hands, and Rachel stirred.

<Rachel’s alive!> I told everyone. <Rachel, are you awake? Can you move?>

<What was I hit with?> she mumbled in our heads.

<Questions later, regroup now!> Jake snapped. <We’re outnumbered, we’re not gonna win this like this!>

<Then let’s get outta here!> David said.

<Can’t,> Marco said. <Jenny’s the priority right now.> He tried to drag her towards the door, but there was little point; it was still full of hork-bajir, and behind them, the human who was trying to get enough space to fire another shot.

<She’s already dead!> David snapped. <It’s just a corpse! It’s sad, but we have to go!> His side had been sliced open; I could see his ribs.

 _Jenny’s the priority. Jenny’s already dead._ There was a solution here, one that didn’t involve us getting turned to mincemeat over the next thirty seconds or so. We wanted to protect the chee’s secret, the yeerks wanted to eliminate the spy, we were having a fight that nobody wanted to have in a space that the controller in charge didn’t want us in and if they let the ‘andalite bandits’ go and left a big mess then Visser Three would…

Visser Three would…

<Wait,> I said. <We can negotiate our way out of this!> I gave a quick rundown of my logic.

<Ax, do it,> Jake said.

<Assistant manager Beryl Chambers,> Ax said. <There is a way to resolve this that does not involve you and all of your soldiers dying.>

The armed human-controller gave a signal. The fighting very suddenly paused.

“It looks to me like you’re the ones at risk of dying, andalite!” she said. “I already took down one of yours; soon I can offer the Visser six… seven new andalite hosts!”

With that, Rachel struggled to her feet.

<As you can see, we are resilient,> Ax said, flicking a stalk eye at Rachel. <Do you think that you are the first to fight us at these odds? We have fought Visser Three himself, many times, and he has not taken a single one of us. Let me explain what will happen if this fight continues. We will escape. We will injure, and possibly kill, several of your soldiers. In the process, this battle – which has already generated more noise than anybody here would like and might already have attracted the attention of the local authorities – may very well spill out into the street itself, leaving your superiors with a cover-up project. And soon, Visser Three will arrive at this restaurant, and he will see a very big mess and some dead controllers and a large public scene, and no andalite bandits. And he will be very, very upset with you, you evil slug controlling assistant manager Beryl Chambers. I am sure you know how the Visser behaves when he is upset with people.>

Beryl looked nervous. So did the other Controllers.

“I suppose you have a better alternative?” she said sarcastically.

<Of course. The best situation here was for you to have not fought any andalite bandits. It would be ridiculous for you to expect to fight any. Why would we have known you were here? How would we have found you?>

“You are here,” she pointed out.

<Says who? The very soldiers who would likely be executed for letting us go? That would be a silly claim for them to make. No, I think it is much more likely that the Visser’s trap worked perfectly, and the spy among you was executed. It is a pity that she could not be interrogated first, but at least your ranks are now safe. This is good news for Visser Three. A neat plan, with no complications. Clearly we were outsmarted.>

“What do you want?” Beryl asked.

<Merely to remove the body of our ally. It has no further value to you. You have completely destroyed her brain. We wish only to bury her with honor.>

Beryl stood, frozen, for several seconds. She exchanged a look with the other human-controller, who was clutching his bird-savaged arm and whimpering. She glanced at the hork-bajir.

“Clear the door,” she snapped. “Juvane, make sure there are no outside witnesses while these interlopers… complete their business. Everyone else, cleaning supplies are in back. We need to remove any evidence of a fight before Visser Three gets here.”

I glanced about at the broken windows and smashed tables, and silently wished them good luck.

<Tobias, sky; make sure we have a clean exit,> Jake said. <We don’t want this on the news either. Take David. It’s the job he was _supposed_ to be doing anyway. Marco, heal up and grab Jenny. Everyone else, put on a human face – not your own, obviously – in case we have to run interference. >

We did our morphing in the bathroom. The controllers didn’t question this or try to stop us. They were far too busy.

With Tobias and David in the air and Jake, Rachel, Ax and I on the ground, we were able to find a fairly clear path for a big silverback gorilla to lug a disproportionately heavy headless corpse through the dark streets and, when we were absolutely sure we weren’t being followed, toss her into a dumpster. Then Jake went to Erek’s to tell him of her location, leaving Ax and Marco to keep guard until the chee could get there to extract her.

As for me? I went home.

I’d had enough alien nonsense for one night.


	21. Chapter 21

I went to see David the next day. I felt a little self-conscious flying to the hork-bajir valley with a little cloth bag in my talons; it was hardly normal behaviour for an osprey. But it was worth the risk.

I wasn’t in the mood for a long discussion with Jara or Ket, so I flew around until I found David, dropped the bag on his head, then landed and demorphed.

“For the record,” I told him as soon as I had lips, “I’m not Jake’s girlfriend, and I don’t need babysitting. This is a military group, and I know you’re new and all, but you’re lucky that running off into the battle like that last night didn’t get someone killed.”

“Yeah, because Jake’s orders totally made sense,” David said, rolling his eyes. He frowned as the dark blue cloth he was pulling out of the bag. “What’s this?”

“Bike shorts. I had to guess your size. I’m sure it’ll be good enough. I’m going to teach you how to morph clothing.”

He rolled his eyes again. “Of course you are.”

“Hey. You can run around naked if you want, but if you want to be useful in the field then – ”

“Oh yeah, I’m sure you totally care if I’m useful in the field. You guys have done nothing but fob me off since I got here. First you take my blue box and don’t tell me where it is, then you fob me off on the hork-bajir, then you don’t take anything I say seriously and Jake tried to stop me from morphing animals he thinks are too strong for me, then I get sent off on useless busywork and everyone gets mad when I actually do something sensible, and now instead of Jake coming out here to teach me himself he’s fobbed me off on his girlfriend.”

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and reminded myself, once again, that David was new.

“Listen to me. You moron. Jake doesn’t know I’m here. He doesn’t organise every second of our days, believe it or not. You want to know why Jake’s in charge? Because it doesn’t cause fights. Rachel or Marco in charge would cause fights constantly, Ax refuses to lead anything and doesn’t have the necessary human perspective, Tobias is the complete opposite of a people person, and I absolutely hate making life-or-death decisions for other people. I don’t know how much attention you’ve been paying to us, but pretty much the only time Jake makes actual decisions is when we’re in the middle of a fight and there’s no time for a vote. There’s no conspiracy against you. There’s no big manly fight where Jake is trying to keep you down. we’re all making the best decisions we can to stay alive and protect humanity, and one of the decisions that I have made, to this effect, is to come here and teach you how to morph clothing. So put on the damn shorts so we can get started.”

“You’re going behind Jake’s back?”

“What’s your obsession with Jake? I’m not going behind his back. I’m doing something obvious, and I didn’t consult him because it’s not really his business, and even if it was he’d expect me to get around to doing it eventually. Do you know why I’m here, and not Jake? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not because he can’t be bothered. My help isn’t a goddamned consolation prize.”

David didn’t have an answer. After a moment of silence, I continued.

“I’m here to teach you this trick because I invented it. Okay? I taught everyone else how to do this. Including Jake. Including Ax. If you want flying lessons, you go to Tobias. If you want andalite language lessons, you go to Ax. If you want morphing lessons, you come to me. And I don’t have time to play petty high school clique games with you, because we have a lot to learn and only two and a half weeks to learn it all in.”

“What’s happening in a two and a half weeks?” David asked, puzzled.

“My birthday is happening in two and a half weeks, and you’re an Animorph, so I expect you to be there. But you can’t show up wearing a face that’s on the back of every milk carton in the city with an insane reward attached, which means we have two and a half weeks for you to learn to control your morphing enough that you can partly morph into another person consistently and accurately, so you can look the same for more than two hours at a time and fool my parents. Okay? If you want birthday cake, we need to get to work.”

David swallowed, and nodded. “Right. I’ll… I’ll get changed, then. Thanks for coming out to teach me this, Cassie.”

“Thank me by trying your best,” I said, turning around so he could undress.

David was rough around the edges, sure. But he was still new, and his whole life had been turned upside down. We were the only support system he had left – maybe it was okay for him to be defensive and paranoid. All in all, he was doing remarkably well. He had faced Visser Three, he had proven himself to be smart and be able to find valuable information, he had shown courage, he…

He had launched himself at hork-bajir and torn out her throat with no hesitation whatsoever…

Teething problems, surely. He could fight. He could survive.

I had a really good feeling about this.


End file.
